Class 
Book 




y ji^Q^ 



GopjTightN?. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



0*^ 






COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY ELLA LYMAN CABOT 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



APR 22 J 9 14 



^Ije »ibers(a>e 3^rcs« 

CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 



©CI.A371500 



CONTENTS 

Introduction v 

I. SotJRCES OF Outside Help to the Pub- 
lic Schools i 

•^. Volunteer Service in Relation to 

Health 14 

HI. Recreation under Guidance ... 23 

IV. The Enjoyment of Art 43 

V. Training for Work 52 

VI. Training for Citizenship .... 75 

VII. Training for Family Ties .... 85 

VIII. New Demands on the Schools . . 104 

IX. The Sphere of Volunteer Help . .111 

X. The Guidance of Volunteer Helpers 121 

Outline 139 



INTRODUCTION 

Public schools should be not only schools to 
which the children go with swinging steps and 
armfuls of books, but schools that the pubUc con- 
tinually loves and serves. It may serve through 
criticism and desire for revision; it must serve 
through inquiring love and through hands offer- 
ing gifts and plans. What we love we serve, and 
no less truly what we serve we love the more. 
Service leaps to love and love to service. There- 
fore, it seems wise to gather together and to clas- 
sify some of the varied t3^es of volunteer help to 
our public schools, that out of the service already 
given more may grow. This study has two aims: 
to suggest to the amateur how to give help and to 
the teaching force how to receive and guide the 
gifts of the public. Superintendents and teachers, 
overburdened by the new social demands made 
upon the schools, may be helped by knowing some 
instances of typical and excellent work freely 
given by the public to the schools. Those lovers 
of education who want to help the schools wisely 
may gain by knowing where they can turn for 



INTRODUCTION 

a survey of the best fields and methods for the 
amateur. 

School men must necessarily be greater experts 
in education than amateurs; but he is expert who, 
among other things, is wise to catch from the lips 
and deeds of many men their contribution to his 
subject. The greatest expert is he who listens 
best and draws on the most varied and eificient 
sources of help in the community. 

The busy superintendent must often long to 
post a sign outside his office door: ^'Peddlers and 
meddlers not allowed in this building." But he 
also knows that the newer forms of social educa- 
tion are galloping ahead with such speed that he 
cannot walk or run fast enough to keep up with 
them. He must welcome all considerate and well- 
balanced help from the public in regard to the 
social aspects of education. 

It is difficult or, more strictly, impossible to 
define the exact meaning of the social aspects of 
education ; for to define means to cut off, and as 
all education is ultimately social we cannot slice 
off a part and call it by the name of the whole. 
But the choice of volunteer helpers as to the ways 
in which they hope to serve the public schools is 
definite. Volunteer helpers of our public schools 
usually turn aside from the established subjects 
vi 



INTRODUCTION 

of the curriculum to concern themselves largely 
with the health, recreation, and training for work 
of the school boys and girls, and with their de- 
velopment into faithful members of the family 
and the State. 

There are, in addition, many instances of help 
from public-spirited citizens in securing larger 
appropriations and specific acts of legislation, but 
those efforts are in the main means to the ends 
named above. 

A valuable contribution to the public schools 
has been given by the Russell Sage Foundation. 
It has published several important studies con- 
cerning phases of school Hfe. Medical Inspection 
of Schools, by Luther H. Gulick, is well known; 
Among School Gardens, by M. Louise Greene, is a 
delightful tribute to the growing interest in gar- 
dening; Wider Use of the School Plant, by Clar- 
ence A. Perry, contributes useful information 
concerning social centers and vacation schools. 
The New York Bureau of Municipal Research 
has encouraged and guided the wide-reaching 
study of service to schools by Elsa Denison, pub- 
lished under the title. Helping School Children. 

The efforts of the public to help the public 
schools are becoming more and more significant. 
Help from outside has been given to the public 
vii 



INTRODUCTION 

schools for many years, probably since the very 
beginnings of education; but we meet now not 
only friends of a special school or teacher, but 
permanent organizations whose sole object it is 
to help schools; not only a gift or a bit of service 
from an amateur, but definite continuous help 
from experts in special lines, playground instruc- 
tors, art museum directors, librarians, doctors, 
nurses, and vocational counselors. 

I select a single example. The Public Edu- 
cation Association of the city of New York 
was granted its first charter in 1899. The per- 
sistent enthusiasm of its members is so great that 
after thirteen years of work it was ready in June, 
191 2, to undertake a program involving an ex- 
penditure for the year of $45,000. The single 
purpose of the Association is to rouse and sustain 
an intelligent interest in pubHc education. For 
these ends it hopes to unite the best efforts of citi- 
zens with the work of the school authorities, so 
that the Department of Education will be inti- 
mate with and responsive to the needs of the com- 
munity, and the citizens appreciative of the aims, 
problems, and means of pubHc education. 

The time has come when school boards, super- 
intendents, and principals must deal definitely 
with the help offered by outside agencies. The 
viii 



INTRODUCTION 

progressive superintendent will study the re- 
sources of his town as a part of his school problem. 
Normal-school pupils will be taught to think of 
the school in which they are to teach as a center 
with radiating lines reaching out toward Hbraries, 
museums, nursing associations, boards of trade, 
and women's clubs. 

The young teacher is now often an untrained 
social worker. She sees in her pupils needs that 
she does not know how to supply, or she is blind to 
wants that are staring from their faces. She can- 
not work out alone the great problems of health, 
housing, physical need, lack of recreation, that 
are silently and incessantly undermining much 
of her best work. But here all about her, some- 
times blazing with a clear flame, sometimes wait- 
ing for a spark to light smouldering embers, is 
public interest in the schools. Even the trying 
smoke of grumbling against the schools signals 
a possible flaming ardor to serve. 

Public interest in the schools is valuable not 
merely as a help in relation to special needs. This 
keen interest is an arrow pointing down a long 
road ahead toward a closer relation between home 
and school. Whither are the new aims of educa- 
tion leading? Again and again it is said that the 
school is taking over, one after another, the re- 
ix 



INTRODUCTION 

sponsibilities of the home. The statement is true. 
Training in the care of health, household art, 
vocational guidance, moral standards, and even 
the supplying of food at the midday meal have 
become a function of many schools. It is a some- 
what startling outlook. Is the way out a way of 
retreat? Shall we exclude rigorously from the 
schools these newer and more intimate activities? 
I believe such a course to be both unwise and im- 
practicable. The way out is a way of advance, 
not of retreat. The homes themselves must be 
drawn into closer and closer sympathy with the 
schools. 

There was an intermediate time in public 
school history when the school, by force of the 
necessity to train children of foreign-bom parents 
imadapted to American standards, took upon 
itself many of the responsibilities of the home. 
Our vision and the beginning of our practice have 
passed beyond that outlook. What we are facing 
and working toward in the last few years is not 
the withdrawal of the homes from responsibiHty, 
but a permeating intimacy of relationship be- 
tween home and school that calls out the best in 
both. The threads of this intimate alliance began 
to twist together when the school first taught the 
children things that made the parents realize in 



INTRODUCTION 

concrete ways the value of education. In the 
early beginnings of manual work, parents came 
delightedly to see what marvelous and useful 
things the children were actually making. The 
first vacation schools in Boston, with their accent 
on nature-study, called out wonderful treasures 
sent by the fathers to the school: shells, carv- 
ings, and minerals, from far-off lands. And this 
dawning interest increases with every step that 
the school takes toward what the parents recog- 
nize as training for daily living. Home and 
school associations have significantly helped this 
movement; the newer forms of vocational train- 
ing are strengthening it by increasing the inter- 
est of boys in the care of their fathers' farms; of 
girls in work in their mothers' kitchens. As agri- 
cultural work, domestic science, and industrial 
training are developed, the homes of the pupils 
open hospitable doors. 

On its side the school is feeling more and more 
the need of definite planning for the future of its 
pupils. That future involves a readiness for home 
conditions and life. The wisest of educators are 
welcoming plans of school credit for home work, 
work in the barnyard, the dairy, and the kitchen. 
This work cannot be undertaken without willing 
help from the homes, nor will it be wholly suc- 
xi 



INTRODUCTION 

cessful until it has made the home a better place 
to live in. 

AH signs then point, I believe, toward a holy 
alliance between the schools and the interested 
citizens, who are, after all, but fathers and 
mothers, sisters and brothers in spirit. Volunteer 
helpers will have at least three important func- 
tions: to initiate and bear the burden of new 
educational experiments before these experiments 
are sufficiently tested to receive municipal aid; 
to give from the reservoir of their peculiar tal- 
ents expert help in time of need; to serve as 
unpaid advisory boards in special schools or sub- 
jects. Through these definite links to the life of 
the public schools, volunteer service will be made 
interesting, appealing, and, if rightly guided, of 
permanent value. 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO THE 
SCHOOLS 



SOURCES OF OUTSIDE HELP TO THE PUBLIC 
SCHOOLS 

The little red school-house has always been a 
bright romantic spot in American history. No 
less so is the gigantic red - brick schoolhouse 
planted in crowded districts of each modem city. 
Here is the home of the spirit of youth, calling 
with incessant appeal to the lover of youth. Club 
women, settlement workers, business men, doc- 
tors on their rounds, athletic college girls, moth- 
ers carrying babies, see as they walk through 
city and country streets the fascinating sight of 
thousands of children of all shapes and sizes troop- 
ing daily to school and whooping away from it. 
And as they look, the citizens become more than 
fascinated. They want to drink of the perpetu- 
ally bubbling fountain of public education ; they 
begin to plan definite ways of helpfulness. 
Even the earlier sporadic efforts to help the 
I 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

public schools are symptoms of an extraordina- 
rily significant movement that is sweeping across 
the United States. We have not begun to appre- 
ciate the meaning and power of public interest in 
the schools. It is, in part, the instinct of a demo- 
cratic people to keep its hand on the guidance 
of education. It is fully as much the instinct of 
parents and child-lovers to express in tangible 
ways their perennial gratitude for childhood. 

The interest of an individual may begin in the 
desire to beautify a schoolroom. She finds a pic- 
ture she loved as a child and offers it to the 
teacher of a primary grade. Decoration of school 
buildings is an early and a persistent expression 
of community interest. In her book on Helping 
School Children, Elsa Denison reports that out 
of three hundred and fifteen superintendents of 
schools asked what citizens had done for the 
schools, over one half answer that they have 
helped in schoolhouse decoration. One wonders 
what proportion of these decorations v/ere eye- 
sores rather than beauty spots. But ugly or ap- 
propriate, they uttered the awakening love and 
helpfubess of a public interested in schools. 

Some form of relief to poverty is also an early 
expression of help to schools. Long ago in Bos- 
ton, some kindly man must have noticed the bare 

2 



SOURCES OF OUTSIDE HELP 

or strangely clad feet of schoolboys shuffling 
about in ladies' high-buttoned boots, three but- 
tons off and one protestingly fastened. Touched 
with pity that the feet must suffer while the head 
was filled, he left in his will a fund for shoes to 
be given to school children. 

With education on the technical side the public 
rarely interferes; its most audible expression may 
be a rumble of dissatisfaction with the teaching 
of arithmetic or penmanship. But where educa- 
tion touches aspects of health, of beauty, of rec- 
reation, of civic and social ties, pubHc interest 
springs to the fore, ready, even insistent, with 
questions, suggestions, and offers of help. This 
community zeal for social and civic education, 
its meaning, its scope, its future, its best ways 
of service, — these are well worth analysis. 

Any such analysis within short compass must 
separate somewhat arbitrarily the social and civic 
v/ork of the school authorities themselves from 
that contributed by outsiders. The public school 
itself is clearly the greatest of social helpers. Im- 
agine the schools of any country closed for a single 
year. Chaos would be upon us. The help given 
here and there by private associations and citi- 
zens to the life of the school is a drop in the well- 
filled bucket of public education. Yet for the 
3 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

sake of defining and limiting our field, we must 
take for granted the accepted institutions of the 
school and deal only with those forms of helpful- 
ness to the life of the pupils which lie, at least in 
part, outside the recognized domain of pubHc 
education. This domain, indeed, constantly en- 
larges. The public school is like a great tract of 
solid land on the borders of a sandy shore. Its 
boundaries are distinct. Its territory is land, not 
the beach, nor the turbulent sea. Yet year by 
year seeds of public interest spring up on the 
sand. Some are blown away by the winds of hu- 
man fickleness. Some are washed away by the 
overwhelming waves of a cleansing and destroy- 
ing competition. But some of the seeds of public 
interest in school life have strong roots. Like the 
blue lupines on the shore of the Pacific Ocean, they 
take hold and year by year add soil to the beach. 
Gradually the solid land reaches forward to in- 
clude new territory. What once was sandy beach 
becomes land. So in educational life much of 
what a few years ago was a vagrant, wind-blown 
seed of outside service to schools is drawn into the 
groundwork of school Hfe. 

This acceptance into the structure of the public 
school of what once was a volunteer form of social 
service has been peculiarly marked in matters of 
4 



SOURCES OF OUTSIDE HELP 

health. Ten years ago in the United States medi- 
cal inspection of schools and school nurses were 
isolated phenomena. You found them here and 
there in small numbers, supported and developed 
by the private initiative of doctors and social 
workers. 

In New York, for instance, twelve years ago 
the Henry Street Nurses' Settlement placed one 
of their trained nurses in a public school and 
helped to organize the system of school nursing. 
Now New York employs over a hundred school 
nurses. The need of medical inspection is clear 
and defined. It meets a public demand. The out- 
sider withdraws as the beach withdraws from 
flowering land. But community interest does not 
die; it takes a new form, or seeks a new field. 

The social activities of the schools themselves 
are worthy of many volumes. They would in- 
clude to some extent every study in the school, 
for every lesson has its social bearing. But these 
school activities are well known. The meaning 
and scope of the community's help to public 
schools is a subject relatively new and largely 
unclassified. To that topic, therefore, it is well 
to confine one's self. What is, then, the center 
of public interest in schools and from what part 
of the community does it come? 

5 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

Primarily, no doubt, the interest of the great 
majority of our school - helping public centers 
round the children; yet special groups of men 
and women are also giving direct help to the 
school authorities through work to increase ap- 
propriations, or make more adequate laws ; other 
groups help teachers to secure pensions, increased 
salaries, or rest-rooms. 

And from whom does this abounding help come? 
Their name is Legion, a loyal Legion, and inevit- 
ably they include many whom no questionnaires 
will ever reach. Yet they tend to form groups — 
associations of parents, women's clubs, educa- 
tional associations, municipal leagues, chambers 
of commerce, librarians, doctors, dentists, minis- 
ters, church societies, and settlement workers; 
more and more with the coming of the voca- 
tional guidance movement, a strong group has 
arisen among associations of business men. 

From another point of view the assistance prof- 
fered may be divided into that of amateurs and 
of professionals. Among amateurs, women's 
clubs, parents' associations, and settlement work- 
ers offer their time, their careful study, and their 
support to plans for recreation, for sanitation, 
special classes, and civic teaching. They give 
from their leisure in liberal service. 
6 



SOURCES OF OUTSIDE HELP 

But there is a growing readiness also on the 
part of professional men and women to help the 
school with unpaid expert service. The modern 
school system is far from being merely a center 
of learning. It is a complex business organiza- 
tion ; its buildings can no longer be put up by the 
village carpenter; they require an expert archi- 
tect; the health of the pupils in our vast school 
system calls for the daily service of doctors and 
nurses; vocational training leads directly to con- 
sultation with employers; and the school's place 
in the community throws upon it the responsi- 
bility of evening recreation for young men and 
women. 

Our boards of education, our superintendents 
and principals cannot be equipped as Jacks and 
Jills of every trade; they would as surely be 
masters of none. They can and will more and 
more ask and receive expert help from the com- 
munity. 

One architect, Mr. J. Randolph Coolidge, Jr., 
of Boston, has developed a plan for grouping 
school buildings round a city park with its abun- 
dance of space, light, and air, and has worked out 
the financial cost of transporting children from 
crowded districts as offset by the sale of valuable 
school property in those districts. An able lawyer 
7 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

in the same city is giving time and strength as 
an advisory counselor of commercial and indus- 
trial schools. 

The Public School Art^ Society in Evanston, 
Illinois, selects and buys all the wall-papers, 
plaster casts, furniture, and rugs supplied to the 
public schools. A mothers' club in Decatur, Illi- 
nois, working with the Decatur Review, secured 
a landscape architect to lay out plans for play- 
grounds and gardening. 

In North Carolina, a doctor with twelve un- 
paid assistants inspected the schools of white and 
colored children in Asheville every week for two 
years. He taught teachers to examine their pu- 
pils; he gave illustrated lectures to pupils, teach- 
ers, and parents on private and public health.^ 
This one example must stand here for many 
instances, known and unknown, of the work of 
devoted physicians in helping school children. 
Much volunteer work is silent and retires before 
questions; the half is not told. 

I have shown that help to the schools is given 
both by amateurs and by professionals. It is 
given alike by individuals and by organized asso- 
ciations. The New York Bureau of Municipal 

* See Elsa Denison, Helping School Children, p. 204. (Har- 
per & Brothers.) 

8 



SOURCES OF OUTSIDE HELP 

Research has been a spur to many a slow-moving 
superintendent and a waving flag to those who 
want to win the race. With insistent accent on 
publicity and efficiency, the Bureau pours out a 
series of pamphlets on efficient citizenship, com- 
paring by skillful statistics and diagrams the 
health, civic, and social work of one school super- 
intendent with another, pricking its way into the 
bubble of ineffective reports and everywhere 
turning on to our school systems the searchlight 
of incessant inquiry. 

Read the list of publications by the Russell 
Sage Foundation : Laggards in our Schools, Among 
School Gardens, Open- Air Schools, Wider Use of 
the School Plant. The titles ring rousing bells. 
Awake ye to the new calling of education ! 

It is significant that interest in helping schools 
is not confined to one sex rather than the other, 
or to one profession rather than another. It is 
even more significant that the help given, seen in 
its broadest sweep, is such that it covers as with 
a garment the whole life of children, both before 
the beginning of the compulsory school age and 
after its close; during play hours, evenings, and 
summer vacations. School-lovers bring parents to 
the schools, and visit them in their homes. Home 
and school associations are formed; cooking, 

9 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

hygiene, and discipline are discussed in a sociable 
mixture of the affairs of body and soul. The 
friendliest of school visitors, privately paid but 
officially recognized, bears the message of an 
anxious teacher to the home and encourages the 
father to support his boy in home study. She 
finds in our crowded cities demoralizing condi- 
tions of housing and persuades the family to move, 
that the child may not turn pallid from lack of light 
or grow morally callous through lack of privacy. 
The weary school principal has more than 
enough to think of in his everyday routine. That 
is partly why it has been private citizens who 
have wondered and pondered on the time before 
children went to school and initiated kinder- 
gartens; thought about hot summer days, when 
children like weeds run wild, and started vaca- 
tion schools. The watchful eyes of child-lovers 
have seen the lack of recreation after school hours. 
Playgrounds and social centers have sprung into 
being. Their growth is like that of Jack's bean- 
stalk. One citizen who has not forgotten his boy- 
hood enunciates the epigram, "The boy without 
a playground is father to the man without a job '' ; 
and the winged words lighting on fertile soil, plant 
playgrounds over the United States. From long 
brooding over the life of the boys and girls who 
10 



SOURCES OF OUTSIDE HELP 

leave school at fourteen, the strong National So- 
ciety for the Promotion of Industrial Education 
takes its rise, and presses through Congress bills 
to give national aid to vocational training. 

Thus everywhere in bewildering variety volun- 
teers are helping the schools. To see any unity 
in the abundant out-pouring of gifts we must 
arrange them in a definite grouping. 

The principal divisions of outside helpfulness 
to public schools may be grouped thus : — 

(i) Health (including relief of the needy). 

(2) Recreation. 

(3) The enjoyment of art. 

(4) Training for work. 

(5) Training for social ties: (a) citizenship; 
(b) family and friends. 

Under each of these divisions a few only of the 
many types of service can be suggested, before 
we go on to give a number of detailed illus- 
trations. 

(i) Health. 

Medical inspection. 
School nursing. 
Open-air rooms. 
Dentistry. 
Public baths. 
Anti-cigarette leagues. 
II 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

School lunches. 

Improvement of housing conditions. 

(2) Recreation. 

School playgrounds. 

School gardens. 

Athletic contests. 

Folk-dancing. 

Choral classes. 

School social centers. 

Vacation schools. 

Story-telling and moving pictures. 

(3) Art. 

School decoration. 

Beautifying the school grounds. 

Art Museum classes. 

Music classes. 

Drama. 

School architecture. 

School pageants. 

Exhibitions of paintings. 

(4) Training for work. 

Vocational guidance. 
Industrial schools. 
Classes in salesmanship. 
Household art. 
Placement bureaus. 

Pamphlets and lectures on vocational oppor- 
tunities. 

12 



SOURCES OF OUTSIDE HELP 

(5) Training for social ties. 

(a) Citizenship: — 

School cities. 

Exhibits of civic conditions. 

City history clubs. 

Civil service reform teaching. 

School peace leagues. 

Boy scouts. 

(b) Family and friendship: — 

Ethical classes. 

Educational moving pictures. 

Home-making classes. 

Social centers. 

Sex education. 

The choice of books. 



II 

VOLUNTEER SERVICE IN RELATION TO 
HEALTH 

School itself has always supplied conditions for 
learning, but these conditions have often been 
physically hurtful. Children have been crowded 
together with too little air, light, humidity. Their 
eyes have been strained by over-use and their 
backs by cramped attitudes; a contagious dis- 
ease caught by one has spread almost inevitably 
through the school. 

Mr. William H. Allen, director of the Bureau 
of Municipal Research in New York, has clev- 
erly expressed this danger of contagion through 
school conditions: — 

Mary had a little cold, 

It started in her head; 
And everywhere that Mary went 

That cold was sure to spread. 

She took it into school one day; 

There was n't any rule; 
It made the children cough and sneeze 

To have that cold in school. 

14 



VOLUNTEER SERVICE AND HEALTH 

The teacher tried to drive it out; 

She tried hard, but — kerchoo! 
It did n't do a bit of good, 

'Cause teacher caught it too.^ 

Medical inspection, school nursing, and den- 
tistry have come into the schools to stay, and 
they have come largely through private initiative. 
In most cases the work has not long remained 
private. Realizing that health goes with success 
in education, the school boards themselves have 
responded quickly and generously to the need for 
medical inspection, school nurses, open-air room.s, 
and instruction in hygiene. Yet still a large sup- 
plementary field is open for private helpfulness. 

In New York City, in 1910, the Committee on 
Prevention of Tuberculosis of the Charity Organ- 
ization Society prepared and circulated through 
the public schools an essay on ''What you should 
know about Tuberculosis." In Brooklyn, New 
York, a similar committee gives in day and even- 
ing schools one hundred illustrated lectures a 
year on tuberculosis. In cooperation with the de- 
partments of health and of education, it main- 
tains on a ferryboat in the harbor an original and 
interesting class with two teachers. There are 
about forty tuberculous children in this class. 
1 William H, Allen, Alice in Health Land. 
15 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

Dental clinics are still largely the gift of gener- 
ous societies and dentists. But more and more 
the public schools and their dauntless teachers 
are shouldering the new and exhilarating tasks 
laid upon them. Like Atlas they stand ready to 
carry the world. In Brookline, Massachusetts, a 
spirited principal has so strongly urged and car- 
ried out the cleaning of the teeth of her school 
children that a special toothbrush is named in 
honor of her school. Many are the paths to fame ! 

For years to come, private associations will 
continue to take charge of lifting to its high- 
est plane the health of children during the long 
summer vacation. Thus they will help the next 
year's schooling of delicate children. 

In Boston for the last three years a group of 
250 children, between the ages of seven and 
twelve, carefully chosen as delicate and needing 
refreshment, have been taken for eight weeks 
during July and August to an island in the har- 
bor. The average attendance in 191 2 was 190. 
The children are selected by school nurses and by 
social workers and the work is supervised by Dr. 
Harrington, director of hygiene of the Boston pub- 
lic schools, but paid for and managed by a commit- 
tee of the Women's Municipal League. Special 
cars take the children to the bridge leading to the 
16 



VOLUNTEER SERVICE AND HEALTH 

island school. A school nurse is engaged to take 
records of their improvement and teach clean- 
liness. The children are given nourishing food, 
they play games, learn simple folk-dances, hear 
delightful story-telling, and during the afternoon 
are taught to take an hour's nap, it being often 
pathetically evident that these little people are 
starved for sleep. 

Another form of work for the health and wel- 
fare of school children, and for the improvement 
of their housing conditions, is accomplished by the 
school visitor, or, as she is called in New York, 
the ''Visiting Teacher." This work is still sup- 
ported with a few exceptions by private societies. 
Some examples will show how the school visitor 
affects housing conditions. One of the school 
visitors works in a very poor quarter of Boston, 
inhabited largely by Italians and Russian Jews. 
The visitor calls each day at the public school, 
and is given a number of cards bearing the names 
and addresses of children about whom the teacher 
is troubled, together with a short statement of 
the difficulty. Armed with this card the visitor 
goes to the house of the parents and talks the 
matter over carefully with the mother, often 
returning in the evening to see the father. 

Last year one boy of twelve years was reported 

17 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

as doing poorly in his school work, and as staying 
out late at night. He had reached only the fourth 
grade and seemed stolid, indifferent, and taci- 
turn. Miss B. visited the house and found a four- 
room tenement in which not only the family, but 
in addition sixteen boarders apparently slept. 
This overcrowding was clearly illegal, and at 
Miss B.'s request the city board of health inter- 
fered and the boarders left. The boy, relieved of 
the strain of uncomfortable home conditions, be- 
came happy and regular in his school work. 

Louis, whose teacher reported him for unclean- 
liness, was found living alone with his father in 
the dressing-room of a Turkish bath establish- 
ment. His father drank, his mother was dead, 
and this was his only home. After school and 
even through the evening Louis worked peddling 
fruit. He earned about two dollars a week, but 
this was not his to own. He had to give it to his 
father. The school visitor protested against the 
dirty room, and the father agreed to move. He 
did, indeed, but only to a worse place, a cold, 
dark basement room four by eight feet, in the rear 
of a tailor shop. There was no furniture in the 
room except one table, a small oil stove, and a 
heap of dirty clothes for a bed. 

Undaunted by her former failure, the school 
i8 



VOLUNTEER SERVICE AND HEALTH 

visitor again expostulated, pleaded, and threat- 
ened with all the resources at her command. She 
came, she saw, she conquered. The father was 
persuaded to move, not only to a clean house, but 
to one where a motherly woman took charge of 
Louis. His personal appearance and his standing 
in school have steadily improved since this time. 

In another and vital way the school visitor 
cooperates with school nurse and doctor for the 
moral and physical health of the school commun- 
ity. In every large school there are cases of feeble- 
mindedness. They bring to the community a 
menace that we are only beginning to appreciate. 
They tax with severe and unnecessary strain the 
overburdened teacher. I knew of a girl so nearly 
idiotic that any effort to teach her was impossible; 
her conduct in school demoralized the class. For 
months that girl sat in the little office of the 
school principal. It was a burden to the princi- 
pal to have her there, but she said, with the un- 
conscious valor of a true public servant, "I could 
not turn her out in the street nor leave her with 
the other children.'^ 

The girl was saucy, flirtatious, uncontrolled. 

Outside of school hours she gathered round her 

and led in fooHsh ways a bevy of boys and girls. 

Appealing to an alienist, the school visitor with 

19 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

the help of the nurse established the girl's feeble- 
mindedness, visited her parents, persuaded them 
that for the girl's best good she should be sent 
to the peace and special care of a school for the 
feeble-minded. 

The conception of the school visitor originated 
in the councils of wise and interested private as- 
sociations for education and social service. It has 
in several cities already been accepted as a help 
which the school principal would relinquish most 
reluctantly. From Mr. John McGrath, principal 
of the Eliot School in the crowded North End of 
Boston, come these words of recognition: "In con- 
gested districts the home and school visitor is of 
service to schools, pupils, and parents. The work 
is no less important than that of the truant offi- 
cer, school physician, and school nurse. There 
is a distinct field for each of these workers and 
plenty of work for each to do. ... I know of no 
money expended for school purposes which brings 
larger returns than the salary paid to the home 
and school visitor." ^ 

The New York Public Education Association 
gives the following list of typical cases helped by 
one home and school visitor : — 

^ Home and School Association of Boston, November, 19 lo 
Report. 

20 



VOLUNTEER SERVICE AND HEALTH 



Complaints of Children by School 
or Others 

(i) Slept in school, dull and indif- 
ferent. 



(2) Teacher's verdict: worst boy 
in school; boy boasted of this. 



(3) Poorly nourished; wrong food. 



(4) Impertinent, idle, etc. 



(S) Disorderly. 



(6) Incorrigible at home and 
school; poor work in class. 



(7) Harboring truants in den in 
the child's yard. 



(8) Cruel treatment at home 
made boy sick at school. 



(9) Unmanageable at home and 
school: immoral. 



Successful Outcome through Efforts 
of Visitor 

Night peddling stopped by schol- 
arship; works well in school; 
ambition roused for technical 
education. 

Boy watched and placed in car- 
pentry class. Now boasts of his 
success, and takes all he makes 
in shop to school teacher. 

Mother angered at suggestions, 
but followed them with gain to 
child. 

Value of school training explained; 
child responded. 

Many weeks of persuasion and 
suggestion; changed diet, whole 
standard of living, and moved 
to better quarters. 

Sunday-School, sewing-class, etc.; 
excellent work at school; stays 
home off streets. 

Other amusements provided for 
the group; class formed at a 
settlement for shop-work. 

Father and mother treated boy 
differently after visitor showed 
interest. 

Encouragement by visitor and 
teachers, continual supervision 
at home and school; record at 
school excellent, and girl placed 
in Clara de Hirsch Home at her 
own request. 



It has seemed important to give in detail the 
work of school visitors because they represent 
21 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

one of the new and important contributions of 
private associations to the health and welfare 
of the schools. 

The efficient school visitor is not only a present 
help in trouble; she suggests and illustrates by 
the quahty of her work a high standard for pubhc 
school attendance officers. School superintend- 
ents and principals, watching her work, see that 
punctuality, attendance, cleanHness, and ambition 
rise at her coming. They will come to see that 
they cannot do without work of this character. 
They will gain, by the force of vivid example, a 
new conception of the right kind of attendance 
officer — no longer a strong-armed, though kind- 
hearted, source of terror to truants, but an under- 
standing friend of school children, looking not 
merely to their actual absence but to the causes 
for that absence, and as far as possible removing 
them. These attendance officers will be more 
highly paid because more highly trained; they 
will be given smaller districts, and they will work 
for good home conditions, sufficient food, and 
recreation; segregation of the feeble-minded; 
chances for home study as well as for attendance 
and punctuality. 



Ill 

RECREATION UNDER GUIDANCE 

The wave of the spirit of play has swept over 
America and inundated the public schools. 
Drawing into its current the contributory streams 
of playgrounds, athletic games, gardening, drama, 
moving-picture shows, pageants, choral class and 
folk-dancing, it floods the whole life of the school 
child besides lapping round the feet of his parents 
and enticing them also to wade in recreation. As 
in the case of efforts to improve health, the rec- 
reation movement has been in many instances 
initiated by private associations, though often 
swiftly adopted by the public school itself. Best 
of all, private and public efforts have grown 
strong side by side, and teachers and parents meet 
in the National Playground Association. Gar- 
dens and social centers well illustrate the rapid 
growth of interest in recreation among school- 
surroundings. 

The kindergarten long ago recognized the truth 
that gardens and children belong together. The 
kindergarten has an honorable length of life, but 
gardens for school children began in the United 

23 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

States no longer ago than 1891, and began, as 
was fitting and natural, through the initiative of 
those whose central interest was in flowers. The 
Massachusetts Horticultural Society in 1890 sent 
Mr. Henry L. Clapp, master of the George Put- 
nam School in Roxbury, to study school gardens 
abroad. When he came home he started for his 
school children a wild-flower garden which still 
yearly blossoms with nearly one hundred and 
fifty native plants. The wise lovers of flowers 
know that the children who have served and pro- 
tected the lives of wild flowers will not pluck 
them by the roots, for service brings understand- 
ing and love. 

In Cleveland, Ohio, the seeds of education were 
sown broadcast with the seeds of flowers. The 
Cleveland Home Gardening Association in 1900 
distributed 48,868 packages of seeds and the next 
year started an experimental garden in the center 
of the city. It was not long before the board of 
education saw the gain to the schools of gar- 
dening and took the unusual step of appointing 
a woman curator of school gardens with an as- 
sistant teacher and three workmen under her.^ 
School gardening is not compulsory. Would any 

* M. Louise Greene, Among School Gardens, pp. 7 and 23. 
Charities Publication Co., New York. 

24 



RECREATION UNDER GUIDANCE 

one, who watches the delight of children in dig- 
ging, suggest that it should be? Flower shows are 
held in September and October, and the curator 
gives informal lessons. She has also worked out 
a plan of correlation between the garden work and 
arithmetic, geography, drawing, and manual 
training. The schools and the gardening asso- 
ciation work together to interest the children in 
home gardens and in the decoration of school 
grounds. 

Philadelphia has the distinction of exceptional 
recognition by the board of education of the 
value of school gardens. Gardening work is a 
part of the school system and the gardens are 
kept growing through the entire summer. The 
board pays for a special supervisor of gardens. 
In Pittsburg, the Playground Association is 
given an annual appropriation from the city to 
carry on playgrounds, recreation centers, and 
school gardening. Experienced teachers take the 
children on long, joyous tramps to secure the un- 
costly treasures of ferns, flowers, and cocoons. 

In Philadelphia and in Washington every class 
from the kindergarten to the normal school has a 
taste and a touch of gardening.^ With the gar- 
den comes definite relation to other lessons : Arith- 
* M. Louise Greene, Among School Gardens, p. 239. 

25 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

metic brightens into measurement of one's own 
property; agriculture and chemistry are touched 
on in ploughing and fertiUzing; it is much more 
fun to cook your own potatoes than the mere po- 
tatoes from a butcher's cart; literature has more 
meaning if it is about your English daisy; draw- 
ing is most careful when it is the design of your 
largest tomato ; and manual training becomes the 
chance to make stakes, boxes, and labels. Grad- 
ually, as the children grow older, business arith- 
metic, bank deposits, columns of profit and loss 
creep in, and recreation gently takes the hand of 
work in full partnership. 

Many herbs grow in gardens beside flowers. 
One enthusiastic volunteer helper of the schools 
writes: ''The garden was used to show how will- 
ing and anxious children are to work, and to teach 
them in their work some necessary civic virtues; 
private care of public property, economy, hon- 
esty, application, concentration, self-govern- 
ment, civic pride, justice, the dignity of labor, 
and the love of nature." ^ Perhaps not all these 
virtues flower in the school garden; not all bear 
seed; but all children v/ant to be care-takers as 
well as care-receivers, and an interest that leads 

» Mrs. Henry Parsons: Report of First Children's School 
Farm in New York City, 1902-04. 

26 



RECREATION UNDER GUIDANCE 

to steady and loving care through heat and cold, 
rain and sun, is the best of teachers. ^' There 's an 
insect eating one of the children's plants. I must 
remove it," said the teacher; but her act was in- 
terrupted by the supervisor. ^'No, no! leave it 
there that the child who cares for the plot may 
notice it. That insect is the real teacher of the 
class." 

In the United States all good things tend to 
join hands and become national movements. We 
have the American School Hygiene Association, 
the Playground and Recreation Association of 
America, the National Society for the Promotion 
of Industrial Education. Gardening associations 
are becoming national in character. Three of 
these, the National Plant, Flower and Fruit 
Guild, the International School Farm League, 
and the Gardening Association of America, stand 
ready to help school work. Normal schools from 
the pioneer, little Hyannis on Cape Cod, west- 
ward all over the nation are preparing teachers 
of gardening. Hardly a village can exist without 
some ardent lover of flowers ready to give land, 
seeds, cuttings, or instruction. In school garden- 
ing, then, there is an exceptionally good chance 
for the schools and the amateurs to unite over 
the lovely subjects of flowers and children. 
27 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

Social Centers 

The name of Jane Addams's book, The Spirit 
of Youth and the City Streets, might stand as the 
underlying motive for the use of our pubKc-school 
buildings as social centers. Here is youth, beau- 
tiful and beauty-loving, restless and appealing, 
and here, facing youth, is the dangerous, dissi- 
pating glamour of the city streets. Here, too, in 
every section of every city stand the great dark 
school buildings looking out silently on the doings 
of the night. It cannot wisely be borne. One by 
one the schools are opening hospitable doors, 
lighted halls, and guided recreation to youth; 
quelling the power of the street by a sounder 
attraction. 

At a civic exhibit in 191 1 the Educational De- 
partment of the Women's Municipal League of 
Boston, of which I was chairman, wanted to rep- 
resent graphically the relation of closed school- 
houses to the dangers of city life in the evening. 
I made a model two and a half feet wide, one side 
of which represented a school hall full of eager boys 
engaged in athletics and the other a saloon with 
drinkers at the bar. A board representing two 
doors was so hung at right angles to the surface of 
the saloon and school that closing the door of the 
28 



RECREATION UNDER GUIDANCE 

school opened the door of the saloon, and opening 
the door of the schoolhouse closed the door of the 
saloon. Below was printed the verse: — 

Trade training means wages; 

Good sport is a boon: 
When you open the schoolhouse, 

You close the saloon. 

The thousands of visitors to this civic exhibit, 
tempted as all human beings are by the primitive 
instinct to handle what they see, were invited to 
keep the door of the model wooden schoolhouse 
open and thereby they inevitably closed that of 
the saloon. 

The far-famed social centers of Rochester, New 
York, with their lively and checkered history, 
were begun through the interest of an unusual 
combination of private associations.^ The Central 
Trades and Labor Council, the Children's Play- 
ground League, the College Women's Club, the 
Daughters of the American Revolution, the 
Humane Society, the Labor Lyceum, the Local 
Council of Women, the Officers' Association of 
Mothers' Clubs, the Political Equality Club, the 
Social Settlement Association, the Women's Edu- 
cational and Industrial Union set the excellent 

* See Clarence A. Perry, Wider Use of the School Plant, 
p. 270. 

29 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

precedent of uniting as a school-extension com- 
mittee. Why should not every city follow this 
admirable example, forgetting those dissensions 
that are behind and pressing forward to a com- 
mon good? Together these eleven organizations 
worked toward the fulfillment of the director's 
aim to develop, through the use of public-school 
buildings, neighborliness, community interest, and 
a true democracy. 

In the winter of 1906 and 1907, the Social Eco- 
nomics Club, a small women's club of Milwaukee, 
passed a resolution to petition the common coun- 
cil of the city to set aside $25,000 for a public bet- 
terment fund, to be used for recreation centers in 
the public schools and for converting the school 
grounds into public playgrounds. This resolution, 
which was presented to the public school board 
and to the Women's Federated Clubs of the Mil- 
waukee district, at once gained the strong sym- 
pathy and support of each. 

With this important backing, the resolution 
when brought before the common council re- 
ceived favorable consideration, but it was then 
discovered that to utilize the public school build- 
ings and grounds, as proposed, the city charter 
would have to be amended. In the mean time, 
as the proposition became understood, it grew in 

30 



RECREATION UNDER GUIDANCE 

favor and won for itself friends in official and 
other influential quarters. With such encourage- 
ment, the women who had the movement in 
charge carried the matter to the Legislature, 
and at the session of 1907 the city charter was 
amended and a law passed to allow the use of 
the buildings and grounds of the public schools 
as petitioned. 

The next important step toward success was to 
secure necessary funds for this work. The imme- 
diate small and initiative expenses were met by 
private subscriptions and contributions from the 
treasuries of interested women's clubs. At this 
crucial point the pubHc school board of Milwau- 
kee placed itself in line with the most progressive 
cities in the country. It appropriated $2500 to be 
used in the sixth district school for social center 
work for one year. This generous act paved the 
way for immediate detailed plans and the new 
experiment was carried out.* 

In Philadelphia a number of school buildings 
are granted for use as social centers by the school 
board who supply light, heat, and janitors. The 
centers are maintained by private organizations. 
The tie to the school authorities is kept strong 
by the fact that all the paid assistants must be 
^ Charities and the Commons, December 19, 1908. 

31 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

approved by the superintendent of schools as 
well as by a special committee of the Home and 
School League. The workers are largely volun- 
teers. 

Athletics 

In athletics the New York Public Schools Ath- 
letic League, with its special branch for girls, has 
shown the closest cooperation with the school 
authorities. The school superintendent is a mem- 
ber, the district teachers always take part, and the 
financial support is guaranteed largely by busi- 
ness men and other members, and in the case of 
girls by pubUc-spirited women. In 1910 an an- 
nual expenditure of $10,000 was made possible 
through private subscriptions. 

The girls' branch has evolved the wise plan 
of teaching dancing and athletics to public school 
teachers free of expense on the condition that they 
give lessons to athletic clubs in their own schools. 
The relation of good standing in school to sport is 
made by insisting that every boy or girl who takes 
part in a competition must have received as high 
as B in studies. In relation to conduct a striking 
sex distinction is made. A girl must receive A 
for conduct, a boy but B before being allowed to 
compete in games. 

32 



RECREATION UNDER GUIDANCE 

Streams of influence from the New York exper- 
iment have flowed far west to the Pacific Coast. 
The Public School Athletic League of Seattle was 
begun by the zeal of the director of the Y.M.C.A. 
who had heard of the New York plan. Through- 
out the country there are many instances of vol- 
unteer help to school athletics. In Baltimore the 
arrangement is wholly outside the school board ; 
in Tacoma, Washington, business men have given 
a large part of the money necessary to build an 
$80,000 stadium.^ 

It is noticeable also that many important 
pieces of investigation about public school athlet- 
ics have been made by those outside the schools. 
Athletics in the Public Schools, by Lee F. Hanmer, 
of the Playground Extension Committee, is pub- 
lished by the Russell Sage Foundation. The 
Advisability of Inter-High-School Contests, by Earl 
Cline is published by the American Physical 
Education Association. 

Vacation Schools and Playgrounds 

The sympathetic eyes of social workers have 
for many years watched children drifting about 
aimlessly or playing illegal games in hot, un- 
shaded city streets during July and August. 

1 Clarence A. Perry, Wider Use of the School Plant, p. 327. 

33 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

Vacation schools, voluntary and popular, have 
been the outcome of observant eyes and trained 
capacity. The first vacation school was started 
as far back as 1866 under the auspices of the First 
Church of Boston; swiftly, in 1870, Providence, 
Rhode Island, through a volunteer committee, 
took up the work. The settlements had already 
helped through their own summer classes and 
were eager to do more; charity organizations, 
civic leagues, women's clubs, and educational as- 
sociations felt the need to set to work. The larg- 
est private undertaking may well be that of the 
Chicago Permanent Vacation School Committee 
of Women's Clubs, which had in charge the ex- 
penditure of $23,217.59 in the support of sixteen 
vacation schools. Of this amount $15,000 was 
given by the Chicago Board of Education.^ In 
almost all cases the boards of education have 
freely given the use of school buildings and their 
equipment, and in many instances, as in New York, 
Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and St. Paul, 
vacation schools have been subsequently adopted 
by the school board as part of its regular work. 
In Pittsburg the board of education contributes 
largely to the support of playgrounds and vaca- 
tion schools, but they are still (1913) under the 
* Clarence A. Perry, Wider Use of the School Plant, p. 135. 

34 



RECREATION UNDER GUIDANCE 

direction of the Pittsburg Playground Associa- 
tion. It is significant to find the vacation schools 
used in two or more cities as an effective instru- 
ment to change the roughness of a gang into an 
energetic interest. " The gang has been tamed/' 
writes the president of the Pittsburg Playground 
Association. ''The West End gang, whose ideals 
had been confined to baseball and pugilism, be- 
came enthusiastic carpenters. Their devotion to 
the fine clean young fellow who was their instruc- 
tor was pathetic. They followed him around. In 
order to cure the sneak-thieving, he would leave 
all the material out on the ball-field and go away 
without making any one boy responsible for it. 
The next morning every bat and ball and glove 
would be returned." 

In Cleveland one vacation school was composed 
entirely of 155 boys who had been assigned to the 
detention home by the judge of the juvenile court. 
They were given gardening, drawing, weaving, 
paper-cutting, clay modeling, and raffia work.^ 

Experiment in the best methods of guided rec- 
reation is one important function for private soci- 
eties who are helping school children. Many vaca- 
tion schools have degenerated, because neither the 

* Clarence A. Perry, Wider Use of the School Plant, pp. 139, 
141. 

35 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

work nor the attendance was kept up to the mark. 
It is, therefore, worth while to show by a single 
example the value of a private experiment in re- 
lation to attendance and curriculum for vacation 
schools. 

The Massachusetts Civic League experimented 
carefully for three years to work out (i) the cause 
and cure of irregular attendance; (2) the most 
appealing and the most valuable summer curric- 
ulum; (3) the relation to one another of different 
agencies for recreation. 

Irregular and irresponsible attendance is a 
danger in all non-compulsory summer work. The 
Massachusetts Civic League minimized this by 
great care in keeping the parents informed of and 
interested in the school. The form of invitation 
to join the vacation school read : — 

A Vacation School will be opened for six weeks 
from July loth to August i8th in the D wight and 
Hyde Schools. Instruction will be given for three 
hours a day in carpentry, drawing, natural science, 
cooking, and singing. Only a limited number of pu- 
pils can be accommodated. If you would like your 
child to have this instruction, please meet the Vaca- 
tion School Committee at the Hyde School on June 
29th at 2.30 P.M. and bring this invitation with you. 

Two hundred parents turned up at this meet- 

36 



RECREATION UNDER GUIDANCE 

ing, most of them eagerly interested in the plan. 
So many names of children for the school were 
brought in that a waiting list was formed and each 
mother was told that if her child was absent three 
consecutive days without a good reason his place 
v/ould be taken by another child. 

The school was filled during the term to ninety- 
three per cent of its full limit, and the directors of 
the school attributed this high percentage first 
to the talks with parents by the school visitor, 
and secondly to the psychological effect of the ac- 
curate records kept on the school cards. These 
cards were brought by each boy and girl and 
punched every day as impressively as though they 
had been season railroad tickets. During the 
third year of the Massachusetts Civic League 
Vacation Schools the committee tried an entirely 
different type of curriculum, if one may use so 
stiff a word for so happy a piece of learning. The 
attempt was made with a group of teachers, 
largely from the Chicago University School, to 
have little children get a clearer idea of the life 
about them in city and country. The plan of the 
school was to enlarge the children's interests and 
to train their powers of observation, reasoning, 
and acting by letting them work out for them- 
selves methods of obtaining food and clothing. 
37 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

Cooking, sewing, drawing, modeling, reading, 
arithmetic were all made to center round this 
plan. 

A cultivation of crops was carried on in the 
large school yard, and here corn, potatoes, lettuce, 
and tomatoes were planted. Inside the schoolroom 
a miniature model farm was designed. Fences, 
rakes, ploughs, and churn dashers of diminutive 
size were made in the carpentry room. Grass 
seed was planted, and real oaks from little acorns 
grew. 

In the section of Boston where the school was 
held, many of the fathers of the pupils were tai- 
lors by trade. Cloth was a famihar object. The 
teacher of textiles seized the opportunity to train 
the children in observation and in thoughtfulness 
by tracing the evolution of cotton and wool into 
cloth. She asked the children about the clothes 
they had on. Gradually they traced back the 
origin of clothes through the store to the factory 
and, with some help, to the cotton and flax plants 
and the sheep. The class was then shown a whole 
fleece. The children worked out the idea that the 
wool must be combed and twisted. After they 
had experimented in twisting the thread, one 
child complained that he needed another child to 
take hold of his thread so that he could twist it 
38 



RECREATION UNDER GUIDANCE 

easily. It was suggested that he should find some- 
thing to take the place of another child, and he 
tied the thread to the back of a chair. Several 
children, tired of twisting wool with their fingers, 
suggested that tops would do it quicker. At last 
a primitive spindle was devised and was made by 
the children in the carpentry shop. The class 
then began to think about weaving. The children 
found it difficult to keep the threads in place, and 
when asked what they needed replied: "Some one 
to hold his hands on both ends of the threads." 
From this suggestion a frame of four pieces of 
wood with nails to hold the warp threads 
was worked out, and the idea of a loom was 
formed. 

This example illustrates the value of anewt5^e 
of work in vacation schools, one that shall help the 
pupils to see and understand a little of the life of 
which they are a part. Private associations, rais- 
ing money from individuals who have faith in 
their work and are willing to risk temporary fail- 
ure, can make such experiments more easily than 
the public school authorities. 

It may well be a function of private enterprise 
to bring together in direct cooperation all the vol- 
unteer agencies working for school children. A 
part of the plan of the Vacation School Commit- 
39 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

tee of the Massachusetts Civic League was to hold 
such conferences. In one of them the following 
questions were discussed: — 

(i) How can we secure regular attendance without 
making the school compulsory? 

(2) Is it advisable to have any part of the expenses 
paid by the parents? 

(3) For what ages is the vacation school work most 
important? 

(4) How far and in what ways should the summer 
work differ from that of the winter? 

(5) Do excursions form a desirable part of the 
work, and how should they be conducted? 

(6) Should it be an aim of vacation schools to give 
instruction that will help the children to earn 
money or prepare for trades? 

(7) How can the relation between the school and 
the children's parents best be developed? 

(8) Ought there to be strict discipline in the sum- 
mer work, or should the standard be relaxed? 

A movement even stronger than that for va- 
cation schools is the playground movement. It 
speaks for itself and needs few words. It is pecul- 
iarly a field for volunteers. Playgrounds con- 
nected with schools need the help of financial aid 
or of supervision. These can often be given by 
volunteer associations before the school board or 
city council is ready to supply the needed money. 
40 



RECREATION UNDER GUIDANCE 

To the women's organizations throughout the 
country more than to any other one agency, the chil- 
dren owe the extensive use of school yards for play 
purposes. 

As an experiment the Newark Board of Education 
left open to the public during the summer all its 
school yards which were without apparatus or super- 
vised play activities. Hardly any children visited the 
yards, many not having a single child in them all day 
long. A successful playground cannot be run without 
skilled play leaders.^ 

In Auburn, New York, the various parent- 
teacher associations carried on playgrounds, col- 
lected money, engaged leaders, secured yards, 
and supplied apparatus. In Madison, New Jer- 
sey, two associations, the Civic Association and 
the Thursday Morning Club, carried on the work 
with some financial help from the city council. 
It is an effective bit of cooperation when, as in 
Buffalo, members of the playground force take 
part in organizing games at recess in the school 
yards. 

The summer use of playgrounds indirectly but 
clearly helps the schools: — 

Teachers point out [writes Perry] that the children 
who have had the advantages of the yards during the 

* Clarence A. Perry, Wider Use of the School Plants pp. 165 
and 173. 

41 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

vacation return to their studies in the fall much more 
alert and ready to work. These results are especially 
noticeable in the case of boys and girls who have at- 
tended supervised playgrounds. Here the necessity 
of waiting one's turn, of having a referee settle dis- 
putes, of playing games according to a program, is so 
obviously related to every one's enjoyment that dis- 
cipline becomes popular, and is supported most ar- 
dently sometimes by those who, in the classroom, 
have been its most constant foes.^ 

" Wider Use of the School Plant, p. i8i. 



IV 

THE ENJOYMENT OF ART 

Art has a far-off sound to Americans. The mu- 
seums have been places for the few to go and look 
at rather than for the many to use. But this state 
of things is fast changing. The Metropolitan Mu- 
seum of Art in New York sounds the keynote of 
its present work as educational efficiency. See 
how much a school-teacher can glean of this har- 
vest for her pupils. In 1 905 , the Museum voted : — 

Whereas, the Trustees of the Metropolitan Mu- 
seum of Art desire to extend the educational oppor- 
tunities of the museum as far as practicable to the 
teachers and scholars of the public schools of the city, 

Resolved, that the Board of Education be notified 
of the willingness of the Trustees to issue on applica- 
tion to any teacher in the public schools . . . a ticket 
entitling such teacher to free admittance to the mu- 
seum at all times when the museum is open to the 
public . . . whether alone or accompanied by not 
more than six public school scholars for whose con- 
duct such teacher is willing to become responsible. 

One thousand and ninety-three applications 
for teachers' tickets were received in 1905. But 
teachers and pupils, wandering weary -footed 

43 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

through long galleries filled with bare white stat- 
ues, or peering into glass cases where many small 
objects a bit broken are pinioned, get little idea 
of the meaning of the museum's treasures. The 
Metropolitan Museum recognized this, and in 
1907 made plans for talks to school folk on art, 
history, and hterature. A room holding 200 peo- 
ple is set aside for the use of teachers and pu- 
pils. Here stereopticon lectures on any branch of 
work that can be illustrated by photographs of 
the museum's treasures are given. Over 10,000 
lantern sUdes of objects in the museum and out- 
side it are loaned to the schools on request. Spe- 
cial courses are given to high school teachers of 
history, art, Enghsh, and classics. In 1908, teach- 
ers with their pupils to the number of 5627 came 
to the museum. 

Everywhere wise people are seeing that labels 
and catalogues are but dumb guides. We need a 
human voice. The MetropoUtan Museum has an 
instructor who in 191 1 escorted 3700 teachers 
through the collections explaining their history and 
meaning. No charge was made for this service. 

Of the response of the children themselves, 
New York has interesting words to say : ^ — 

* Metropolitan Museum, New York, Bulletin, September, 
191 2, vol. Ill, no. 9. 

44 



THE ENJOYMENT OF ART 

An enthusiastic visiting teacher of the school de- 
termined to carry out a long-cherished plan to make 
the museum a vital influence in the lives of these chil- 
dren. She wanted to drive out of their minds certain 
thoughts by the substitution of a thought of some- 
thing refined. She wanted to give them while young 
ideals, that life to them might be more than material 
possession and that their power of enjoyment of the 
things about them might be less restricted by igno- 
rance and dulled sensibilities. 

With this ideal in mind the classes were begun. 
One group was made up of troublesome boys in 
the school. 

We chose first, the life and art of early Egypt, try- 
ing to draw from them their own impressions and ex- 
planations of what they saw. At the end of the hour 
they voted to come again and many of these boys 
were constant members of the class for the rest of 
the spring. One boy, fond of drawing, made admir- 
able quick sketches as we talked about the objects. 
His book contained sketches of Egyptian boats and 
necklaces, a Greek temple, a chariot. . . . One boy 
gave up a birthday party and another a May party 
to come. . . . Mothers returned on Sunday after- 
noons and went through the galleries again with the 
boys. 

In many cases the experiment of taking school 
children to visit art museums has been made 

45 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

with the aim of quickening observation and giv- 
ing happy ways of spending leisure. But if the 
schools and the museums are to be partners in 
special forms of education, the museum must be 
used definitely to enrich subjects already taught 
in school. To most of us the needles we seek in a 
museum are hidden in a haystack of bewildering 
aisles and cases. The teacher needs a magnet to 
find her needles. Such magnets the museums are 
beginning to supply. Only a lover of children and 
a clear-eyed believer in the value of art museums 
can plan this work. In Boston the education com- 
mittee of the Museum of Fine Arts has in its 
midst a seer, prophetic and faithful. She sees 
that at five different facets the collections of art 
museums reflect light on school work. Art may 
light up literature, history, geography, drawing, 
and industrial training. At her suggestion the 
use of objects within the museum to enrich these 
school topics has been carried out. Dr. Arthur 
Fairbanks, director of the Boston Museum of 
Fine Arts, and long a student of Greek classics, 
has helped to make vivid the school stories of 
Greece and Rome by making a list of objects in 
the museum that illustrate Greek and Latin 
myths and legends. 

One Boston teacher, with the help of the offi- 

46 



THE ENJOYMENT OF ART 

cers of the Museum of Fine Arts, uses in her 
classes over six hundred photographs illustrating 
Greek and Roman history from prehistoric times 
to the time of the Roman Empire. Once a month 
her pupils come to the museum, see the originals, 
make sketches, and go back to work with a more 
concrete grasp on history. 

History and geography need this quickening 
impetus of eye and touch. Here in the Boston 
Museum of Fine Arts is a clay cup made in Aby- 
dos at a time when the Israelites were in captiv- 
ity in Egypt. You can still see and feel the mark 
of the potter's thumb and finger impressed there 
on the soft clay four thousand years ago. The lip 
of this cup is curved that we may pour from it; it 
has a handle, and its sides are decorated. Here is 
a life bust of Nero, hateful in his sneering com- 
placency, and here a mirror of polished metal 
used by a queen in Egypt. Paintings, too, reveal 
the meaning of history. 

If the struggle between Spain and Holland is stud- 
ied in school, the contrasting characters of the Span- 
ish and Dutch races, their different governments, and 
opposite points of view, will be the better understood 
if the student is familiar with their painters. Velas- 
quez shows the life of the court in his land of courte- 
ous manners, of despotism, and of power. In striking 

47 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

contrast with this is the life depicted by the Dutch 
painters. They painted the common, everyday life of 
the people, — the pastures, the cows, the windmills, 
the harbors filled with boats; and they also painted 
portraits of the strong men and women who made 
their history. One cannot study the paintings and 
prints of Spain and Holland, represented in our mu- 
seum, without gaining an understanding of these 
peoples that books alone cannot give.^ 

An interesting bit of interchange between the 
art museum and the public schools in relation to 
drawing and painting was made by Professor Wal- 
ter Sargent, now at the University of Chicago. 
While in charge of drawing and manual arts in 
the public schools of Boston and a member of 
the education committee of the Museum of Fine 
Arts, he obtained from the museum photographs 
showing skies, clouds, sunrise, and sunset. These 
photographs he took to the schools and the chil- 
dren drew from them, coloring them according 
to their imagination and from watching sky and 
sunset on their daily way. Then a group was 
taken to the Museum of Fine Arts and shown the 
original paintings. The children saw the paint- 
ings freshly now, for they, like the original artists, 
had pondered over color. 

* Anna D. Slocum, in Proceedings of the American Association 
of Museums, vol. iv, 191 1. 

48 



THE ENJOYMENT OF ART 

The infant industrial movement in education 
is already receiving protection from art muse- 
ums. The Boston Museum gives a course of lec- 
tures on textiles to teachers from Simmons Col- 
lege, the Girls' High School of Practical Arts, 
and the Trade School for Girls in Boston. The 
Trade School sends to this course the heads of 
its milHnery, dressmaking, and art departments. 
Through this course the rare and beautiful tapes- 
tries, garments, and embroideries in the museum 
are playing their part in setting a standard for the 
garments of to-day. 

Museums of science like museums of fine arts 
are advancing with liberal offers to help the 
schools. Among the best stands out the Children's 
Museum of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and 
Sciences, especially planned to interest children 
and in touch with the public schools, though not 
officially connected with them. The Children's 
Museum helps to enliven school work and to give 
to lessons clues of related interest through spec- 
imens of birds, flowers, insects, and ferns, and 
talks about them. One case of birds is labeled ap- 
pealingly, "Birds we read about"; and in it is 
shown, among other birds, the great albatross fa- 
miliar in name to every child-reader of the Ancient 
49 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

Mariner. In history as well as in science the col- 
lections of this museum enrich school work. In a 
special room little models and dressed dolls illus- 
trate accurately and graphically some scenes from 
early French, English, Spanish, and Dutch set- 
tlements in America. Lectures relating to school 
work, talks about Lincoln and Washington, are 
held on appropriate days, and are so popular 
that the small lecture hall has often to be filled 
with three different groups of children one after 
another. Eighteen thousand children come to the 
Children's Museum each year. 

The festive art of music has long had its place 
in schools, but only of late have private societies 
helped to bring its influence into the lives of 
school children. The social centers are the nat- 
ural stamping-ground for orchestra and singing. 
Many a lad has there blown his inertia away on a 
horn and beat out his roughness on a big drum. 

In Chelsea, Massachusetts, a music-loving 
woman's club started, with the help of the super- 
visor of music, violin classes, at twenty-five cents 
a lesson, for all school children who wanted them. 
In many instances, as in Richmond, Indiana, the 
high school has opened its doors for concerts, or- 
chestras and choral festivals. In Richmond the 

50 



THE ENJOYMENT OF ART 

school board has done more. It supplies the 
teacher, and in connection with the local com- 
mercial club buys the more expensive instru- 
ments for the student orchestra. 



TRAINING FOR WORK 

Vocational Guidance 

"What shall I do?" every boy and girl asks 
sooner or later, and we attempt wisely or igno- 
rantly to reply. Vocational guidance is the mod- 
ern long-winded word for a difficult yet common 
undertaking that nearly all of us must by force of 
circumstances have a hand in. The newer aspect 
of this movement to help boys and girls, leaving 
school, is that it attempts to give counsel based 
on careful study of the full facts of the case, — 
the boy, the home, the job, the pay, the environ- 
ment, the future prospects. This more expert 
vocational guidance has been initiated almost 
wholly by private associations. 

Vocational guidance was started on a definite 
plan in Boston in 1907 under a man of genius, Dr. 
Frank Parsons, who organized a bureau for the 
purpose of advising boys in their choice of work. 
Dr. Parsons died suddenly a few years later, but 
his work has been continued and his book, Choos- 
ing a Vocation,^ remains as stimulating reading. 
* Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. 
52 



TRAINING FOR WORK 

Since the reorganization of the Vocation Bureau 
in 1909, its relation to public school pupils has 
become"intimate. The Vocation Bureau works 
directly with the public schools through their 
Committee on Vocational Direction. Mass meet- 
ings are held to interest parents and teachers, and 
in each school a vocational counselor gives advice 
to the children who are leaving school. The Bu- 
reau issues pamphlets on leading industries, giv- 
ing the physical conditions, the skill needed, the 
pay, and the chances of advancement. Over one 
hundred industries, including among others the 
callings of the shoemaker, the machinist, the 
baker, the architect, have been thus investigated 
and described. 

Similar work for girls is done by the Girls' 
Trade Education League. It makes a study of 
the business opportunities open to girls between 
the ages of fourteen and eighteen, and by its sus- 
taining arm tries to hold girls from falHng hap- 
hazard into the nearest niche of work regardless 
of their own fitness or the future before them. 
The League makes a careful investigation of all 
occupations in which young girls are employed 
near Boston, the wages, the moral and sanitary 
conditions, the character of the work, the possi- 
bihty of advance, and also the quahties of mind 

53 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

and body that a girl needs to do her work 
well. 

Take, for example, the subject of millinery. A 
short pamphlet published by the League gives any 
girl the chance to know the processes of the work 
from making bands and Hnings to the final trim- 
ming. The bulletin tells her the pay in different 
parts of the work, from the assistant helper, at 
from three to six dollars a week, to the trimmer, 
who rises to twenty-five dollars a week. It warns 
her that the disadvantage in millinery is that 
the trade season is short and advises her to find 
chances for other employment during the dull 
periods. At Christmas time, when the world is 
too busy to buy hats, she may easily find a 
place in a store. 

The pamphlet then tells the girl where she can 
best learn the trade and suggests the qualifica- 
tions needed. She requires good eyesight, ability 
to use her fingers quickly, perseverance, and en- 
durance. She must have dry and deft hands. It 
will be good if she is interested in the people to 
whom she sells her goods; it is essential that she 
should like to sew and to combine colors. 

Preparation for work has many aspects. One 
bit of guidance has been the special interest of the 
Committee on Vocational Opportunities of the 

54 



TRAINING FOR WORK 

Women's Municipal League of Boston. This 
committee has published charts and a hand- 
book showing the work of over two hundred of 
the best vocational schools accessible to Boston. 

Boys and girls leaving the regular school course 
are often discouraged from taking industrial or 
professional training by not knowing where to go, 
or what the cost and the outcome will be. Just 
as the Girls' Trade Education League gives in- 
formation concerning the actual trades, so the 
Women's Municipal League offers direct help in 
relation to opportunities for trade training. It 
adds one special feature. It pubHshes a full and 
interesting Kst of the educational and industrial 
opportunities for the physically handicapped. To 
this special chart the League adds its word of 
good cheer. " Below are Hsted some of the schools 
that take away the handicaps from children and 
give them chances to be happy and useful citi- 
zens." Schools for the blind, deaf, and crippled 
are in this list, and, as on the other charts, the 
headings cover the name and address of each 
school, its purpose, subjects taught, special fea- 
tures, requirements for admission, cost, season, 
length of course, and the placing of grad- 
uates. 

Outside of special schools for the handicapped, 
55 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

the schools listed include industrial, commercial, 
continuation, professional, art, and music schools 
and the training in settlement classes. A richly 
varied outlook is suggested for choice. There are 
excellent schools listed for dressmaking, millinery, 
stenography, automobiling, teaching, nursing^ 
engineering, pottery-making, watchmaking, draw- 
ing, music, telegraphy, piano-tuning, printing, 
and many other subjects. The work of the Voca- 
tion Bureau, the Girls' Trade Education League, 
and of the Women's Municipal League all illus- 
trate how valuable to the public schools may be 
trained and earnest associations of volunteers. 
The school authorities of Boston are in touch with 
all three organizations. Among the best school 
experiments are those where expert and amateur 
go hand in hand, blazing a trail through unknown 
woods. 

The Philadelphia Public Education Associa- 
tion, long noted for its enlightened and steadfast 
service to the schools, made in 191 2 an admirable 
report under the alluring title of The Child, the 
School, and the Job. What firm footing do not the 
Saxon words suggest! This study was made at 
the distinct request of the Philadelphia School 
Board, to whom Superintendent Brumbaugh 
wrote: — 

56 



TRAINING FOR WORK 

There is need of a comprehensive study of this en- 
tire problem (the relation of child labor to education) 
and while it is a legitimate function of the Board of 
Education to support such a study, I am of the belief 
that certain volunteer associations of this city, com- 
posed of many patriotic citizens, would gladly under- 
take the study without expense to the taxpayer, if 
your body were to indicate your desire for such a 
study and offer such cooperative support as to you 
may seem wise. 

The Public Education Association at once offered 
its services in making such a study, and in July, 
191 2, a Bureau of Vocational Guidance for the 
pupils of the public schools was established by 
the school board. In the report of the Public 
Education Association the proportion of children 
entering factories, stores, housework, offices, and 
street trades was given not only in dry percent- 
age tables. A clever cartoon pictured the same 
facts in illustrations of boys and girls doing the 
particular job, from the forty-three per cent of 
factory employees with their bobbins down to the 
wee figure of one and one half per cent calling out 
newspapers. In this case, as in practically all 
cases of effective vocational guidance, the Public 
Education Association had direct access to the 
school records, and the attendance officers agreed 
57 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

to add to their regular inquiries questions con- 
cerning the kinds of industry and the wages re- 
ceived by children of fourteen to sixteen. The 
report showed : — 

1. That the problem of the working child in Phila- 
delphia is not an immigration problem; over 
half of those reported as at work are of the sec- 
ond generation of American birth. 

2. That it is not the problem of the boy alone, 
since over forty-nine per cent of the workers 
are girls. 

3. That the employments chosen offer a relatively 
large initial wage, but little chance for improve- 
ment. 

Employment Supervision 

The school of Civics and Philanthropy in Chi- 
cago has since 191 1 guided a small experiment in 
employment supervision, thus carrying one step 
farther the idea of vocational guidance. Names 
of boys and girls who leave the truant school and 
several of the grammar schools are given to the 
head of the School of Civics and Philanthropy, 
and through trained workers the school places 
these youngsters in situations fitted to them. It 
is a new and a delicate task. It does not yet lie 
within the usual radius of pubHc school work, 
though the enlarging of the swift-growing school 

S8 



TRAINING FOR WORK 

sphere seems rapidly to be bringing even the 
actual placing of children in positions within its 
scope. This is just the moment for trained help 
and financial support from outside the pubHc 
school department. School authorities cannot 
wisely ask from the city an appropriation for a 
very uncertain experiment. The idea of voca- 
tional training has come down solidly to earth and 
has taken root. The schools are facing, with some 
hesitation, the difficult problems of vocational 
guidance and actual placing of boys and girls. 

It is at this stage that trained amateurs — free 
from the financial restrictions of a defined budget, 
free from pressure to do for the whole town what 
they do for a single school, free largely from 
disaster if the experiment fails — can help the 
schools. The history of the experiment in Chi- 
cago is of value to all enterprising schools. 

The Chicago School of Civics and Philan- 
thropy, a joint committee from the Woman's 
Club, the Chicago Association of Collegiate 
Alumnae, and the Woman's City Club, united to 
make possible this experiment of placing chil- 
dren leaving the grammar schools. They have 
had, in addition, the salary of two paid workers, 
one given by the Chicago Woman's Aid, and one 
given by the Association of Commerce, help from 
59 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

the residents of several settlements, and coopera- 
tion from a number of other clubs. 

In 1 9 13, the board of education gave quarters 
to the placement workers in the school commit- 
tee office, under the definite title of Department 
of Vocational Supervision, supplied their clerical 
and office expenses and gave them careful over- 
sight. The workers in 19 13 were holding office 
hours in sixteen different schools and receiving 
at these offices children from sixty-four other 
schools. It is suggestive that this association, 
originally meant to find the best employment for 
children, has more and more come to urge boys 
and girls of fourteen to sixteen to stay in school. 
The department finds so little opportunity for 
skilled and healthful employment for children as 
young as fourteen that an important part of its 
aim is stated thus : — 

1. To encourage boys and girls to remain in school 
and to continue their education after leaving 
the elementary school. 

2. To refrain from suggesting to the child the possi- 
bilities of going to work before it is absolutely 
necessary. 

The vocational supervision department finds 
that the majority of the children who ask for ad- 
vice about work can well afford to return to school, 
60 



TRAINING FOR WORK 

and also that there is little good employment for 
children between fourteen and sixteen, and that 
every day fewer employers are taking them. In 
view of these facts, the wise directors are studying 
the industrial opportunities for boys and girls in 
the neighborhood of the free vocational schools. 
They hope to persuade employers to send their 
young helpers to such schools for at least a few 
hours each week. Thus a society started outside 
the schools is encouraging children to continue 
longer at school. 

A Placement Bureau 
There are times when one sharp-pointed experi- 
ence will stab our spirits wide awake. Here is a 
true description of wasted youth that makes any 
reader long to help: — 

A TRUE STORY 

On the last day of last January, John Panello, aged 
fifteen years and five months, graduated from a pub- 
lic grammar school in New York. On the 20th of 
February he got his "working papers" from the 
board of health. In school he had been fond of arith- 
metic and from childhood had wanted to become a 
bookkeeper. But the classroom had become irksome 
to him, and his parents, financially comfortable, had 
just "taken it for granted" that he would go to work 
61 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

after graduation. He received no answer to his first 
application for a job — that of office-boy in a place 
where he hoped that he might work up to a position 
as bookkeeper. So during the first three weeks after 
leaving school he spent his mornings looking for work 
and his afternoons gathering bits of wood with an- 
other boy and selling them around the neighborhood 
for kindling. 

His efforts finally got him a job as errand-boy for 
a dyeing and cleaning establishment. Five dollars a 
week were the wages, and tips amounted to a dollar 
or two extra. At the end of one week the boy who had 
had the job before came back and John was " fired. " 
He thought that if he could have stayed there five 
years he could have "got ahead." 

After a day's hunt he saw a sign, "Boy Wanted," 
and was taken on by a firm manufacturing ladies' 
hats. Here he swept the floor, ran errands, and helped 
to pack. At the end of two weeks, during which he 
had been paid $4 a week, he left because " a feller who 
had been there four years was getting only $6 a week." 

Before leaving, he had been lucky enough to get a 
promise of a job with a millinery firm. At first his 
work consisted in "going for stuff to the first floor," 
then he ran a crimping machine, and next was de- 
tailed to "get the cord downstairs for the men who 
make rugs." After a week and a half of this, during 
which his wage was $4.50, "another feller said, ' Come 
along and learn carpentry,'" so John got a job at 
loading and unloading wagons for a firm that made 

62 



TRAINING FOR WORK 

wooden boxes. He was soon allowed to sandpaper the 
sides of boxes with a machine, and then was put at 
cutting out sides for boxes with a circular saw. One 
afternoon he reversed the elevator suddenly and 
burned out the fuse; so he hurried home, afraid to 
meet the elevator man. When he learned next day 
that the boss was going to move to Staten Island, he 
decided to quit, though he was getting $5 a week. He 
had been with the firm two weeks. 

During the next three weeks John did five diflferent 
kinds of v/ork for a manufacturer of jewelry and no- 
tions. He was making $4.50, but when a man said, 
*' Come along, I've got an ofl&ce job for you," he quit. 
The *' office job " consisted in acting as shipping clerk, 
running errands, answering the telephone, and sweep- 
ing the floor for a manufacturer of artificial flowers. 
He is still there, getting $5 a week. He does n't 
think much of the work. " What can I learn there? " 
he asks. 

This true story came out in the Survey in 191 2, 
and almost at the same time a minute experi- 
ment in placement work was begun in Roxbury, 
a district of Boston. For some years there had 
been vocational guidance in Boston: that is, a boy 
or girl would be told about different trades and 
given good advice about them. The initial step 
toward getting work was taken, but the boy of 
fourteen does not march by himself, — you must 

63 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

take more than a single step with him. It will be 
some time before he can walk alone in the con- 
fused and narrow path of the working world. He 
needs not only advice, but recurrent help. If he 
falls down in a place, he must be picked up. If 
he stumbles, — and who among us does not, — 
he must be braced to new effort to hold himself 
upright. All careful investigation and experience 
show that boys of fourteen to sixteen, left to 
themselves, drift from one job to another or fall 
to loafing on the streets till Satan finds suitable 
mischief for their idle hands to do. In the effort to 
relieve Satan of a part of this care, the Placement 
Bureau was started in May, 191 2, by the Chil- 
dren's Welfare League of Roxbury, with financial 
help from the Educational Department of the 
Women's Municipal League and the Girls' Trade 
Education League. The intimate cooperation of 
this group of workers with the Boston School 
Committee is shown by the fact that the head- 
master of one of the schools was made chairman 
of the Committee on Education and Employ- 
ment. The School Committee granted the list of 
names of June graduates from five schools near 
by and gave offices in one of the public school 
buildings. The work was begun by interviews 
with the children needing work and their teachers 

.64 



TRAINING FOR WORK 

and parents. Then in June came a week of talks 
and practical excursions for the children. The 
schedule for one day reads thus : — 

Wednesday, June 26 — 9 to 1 2 

General Topic. 

How to apply for a position, with 
practical demonstrations. 

Speaker. ^ Mr. James F. Coburn, Filene's De- 

partment Store. 

Excursion. (Boys) Wentworth Institute (ma- 
chinery), i 
(Girls) Telephone School. 

On the ist of July, 191 2, plans for actual place- 
ment of the eighty-three children said to need 
employment were finished. Seventeen were found 
to be under the legal working age: seven decided 
to return to school, and one was unfit for any 
work. This left fifty-eight of the group to be 
placed. Others appHed later, and one hundred 
and ten were finally placed; sixty-four by the Bu- 
reau and forty-six by parents and friends. The 
children were asked what work they wanted to 
do. Their answers were pitifully meager. Ten 
boys had no choice, and the rest looked mostly to 
store work. Only twelve expressed individual 
tastes, seven embryo machinists, three electri- 
cians, one farmer, and one theater usher. The 

6s 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

girls looked also to stores and office work. Only 
five of the twenty-nine expressed the desire to be 
nursemaids. Hardly a child wished to follow his 
father's trade; hardly a father wished his boy to 
choose the same work. 

For several weeks it was difficult to find suitable 
places for these immature, untrained children, 
but, gradually, carefully traced advertisements 
and circular letters to selected employers won 
their way and offers began to come in. Each 
place was personally investigated and a child 
fitted to it was chosen. Then, to deyelop initia- 
tive, the child was sent alone, but with a note to 
the employer, who was asked to fill out and return 
to the Bureau the date of employment and wages 
given. The positions chosen included shipping, 
machine work, electricity, engraving, typewriting, 
office work; the wages varied from four to six dol- 
lars a week. Nearly a thousand applications for 
workers were received between June i, 191 2, and 
June 30, 1913. After a year's work the Place- 
ment Bureau reports that 1781 children have 
been actually interviewed, registered, and fol- 
lowed up in their occupations. These children 
came from sixty-six of the seventy-one grammar 
schools of Boston. Many were persuaded to go 
back to school. Of those employed, ninety-five 
66 



: TRAINING FOR WORK 

per cent of those reported were doing good or ex- 
cellent work; sixty per cent were still in their first 
positions, and twenty-five per cent in their sec- 
ond; only four per cent had made frequent 
changes. 

The Placement Bureau makes its test of suc- 
cess the permanency and satisfaction of the tie 
between employer and employee. The children 
and parents are seen; the employers are asked for 
suggestions as to how a boy's or girl's work can be 
improved. These interviews strengthen not only 
the working interest and ability, but the human 
touch. One generous employer offered to loan a 
boy sent to him sufficient money to go to a busi- 
ness college and thereby earn more wages. 

The Placement Bureau, therefore, does more 
than place children. It helps to keep them in 
place. Once in every week or two the employer 
is asked how Johnnie is getting on; Johnnie's par- 
ents are asked; Johnnie himself is spurred on to 
work and contentment. Even a skittish horse 
keeps straighter on his path for a friendly voice 
and a guiding rein. Is it not significant that two 
only of the unbroken, coltish boys for whom the 
Placement Bureau secured work during the first 
summer lost their places? 

Among the best ways in which private associa- 

67 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

tions can help solve the problems of the public 
schools is that of the initiation of new and often 
expensive experiments in the line toward which 
the arrow of progress flies. Placing at work and 
holding to interest in the right work is surely a 
function either of the school itself or of some pri- 
vate society closely in sympathy with the school. 
The Placement Bureau is a peculiarly effective bit 
of cooperation between the public schools and 
organizations interested in them. It has called 
out the help not only of the Children's Welfare 
League, the Women's Municipal League, the 
Girls' Trade Education League, but of the Cham- 
ber of Commerce, the Consumers' League, and 
groups of students from Harvard, Radcliffe, and 
Wellesley College who gather information re- 
garding the establishments employing boys and 
girls. 

Experiments like those in Chicago and Boston 
may well be repeated or rather reenacted, for un- 
der other conditions they would not be the same. 
Watch a child cross Broadway : he may start care- 
lessly, and then, terrified by the noise, rush back 
to the sidewalk; he may go headlong and land 
breathless on the other side; he may stumble and 
fall, with danger of being run over. It is more dif- 
ficult to cross the gap between school and work 
68 



TRAINING FOR WORK 

than to cross Broadway. The untrained, un- 
guided boy or girl of fourteen to sixteen is usually 
unhappy in his work and useless to his employer. 
''I would rather pay an untrained boy of fourteen 
to keep out of nay office than to have him in it,'* 
said a kindly merchant last year. 

Business men are welcoming the efforts of the 
Placement Bureau. ''It is the most practical 
experiment we Ve encountered in many a day," 
they often say. The schools can well afford to 
watch such experiments in aid of their graduates. 
More help will spring up if the schools ask for it. 

Vocational education and industrial training on the 
one hand, and the investigation of industrial oppor- 
tunities on the other, are throwing out splendid 
girders toward one another, but the meeting of the 
two at the central arch will never be consummated 
until placement is a part of the masonry. The logical 
goal of all vocational education of teachers, of parents, 
or of pupils, the establishment of industrial and con- 
tinuation schools, the compilation and distribution 
of charts and handbooks, the investigation of indus- 
trial opportunities should be the fitting of the child 
not orAy for but into his lifework.^ 

1 Helen W. Rogers, The Placement Bureau' Bulletin of 
Women s Municipal League of Boston, December, 1Q12 
P'32. ' ^ ' 

69 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

Classes in Salesmanship 

Part-time schools are emerging on the public 
school horizon. They are already compulsory for 
children at work up to the age of sixteen in Cin- 
cinnati and in Cleveland. In 1913, Massachu- 
setts passed a similar law requiring part-time 
schooling for children up to sixteen when so voted 
by the school board of any town or city. With 
part-time schools comes the demand for a new 
kind of teacher, trained in industry, trained in 
sympathy both with children and employer. In 
this training of teachers and the working-out of 
methods, wise volunteers have already greatly 
helped. 

In 1906, the Women's Educational and Indus- 
trial Union of Boston opened a class in salesman- 
ship for girls. It was an uphill road the first year; 
only six girls joined and their training in actual 
selling was limited to the small food salesroom of 
the Union itself. But in 1907 six of the leading 
department stores of Boston agreed to lend their 
help and sanction to the plan. The superintend- 
ents of these six stores formed an advisory com- 
mittee for the school and met once a month with 
its director for discussion of the common needs of 
the shops and the school. 
70 



TRAINING FOR WORK 

Thus the school began to realize and to meet 
the needs of the stores and the stores to appre- 
ciate the value of distinctive and intelligent 
training for their salesgirls. More than this, the 
alliance between school and store became a genu- 
ine friendship and guardianship. The relation 
between employees, customers, school-teachers, 
and shop-owners, a relation stiffened and strained 
by the overwhelming size of modern commerce, 
was drawn back into a personal human tie. 

After a number of experiments as to hours and 
wages, the following plan has been worked out: 
The girls are engaged by the stores as saleswomen 
and are sent by the store managers to the school 
of the Women's Educational and Industrial 
Union. They come to the salesmanship school 
from 8.30 to 11.30 A.M., and spend the rest of the 
day at work. The stores pay them full wages for 
a three months' course, deducting nothing for the 
hours spent in school. The gain in efficiency seems 
sufficient to warrant not only full pay for part- 
time work, but increase in pay as the years go 
on, relatively above that of the untrained sales- 
woman. 

The school course includes business arithme- 
tic. The truly practical question, "How much 
would I of a yard of ribbon cost at 19 cents a 

71 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

yard? " arouses puzzled looks and biting of pencils 
in many a student, yet it is the type of problem 
with which saleswomen must constantly deal. 
The students are taught to spell technical or dilBS- 
cult words; they study the different textiles that 
they will be called on to sell ; they are given phys- 
ical training and taught simple hygiene. Best 
of all, they have salesmanship discussion based 
on incidents noticed in the store, and through 
demonstration sales, observation, and teaching 
they learn something of the vagaries of that mul- 
tiple animal whom storemen call the ''real boss 
of the store," — the customer. One saleswoman 
complained that a customer of the undecided type 
of mind bought nothing, though every article of 
the kind she desired had been laid before her. 
The teacher suggested that the saleswoman 
would have been wiser to have shown only a few 
goods. The undecided customer feels the embar- 
rassment of too rich a choice and goes away con- 
fused and empty handed.^ 

These classes in salesmanship have many inter- 
esting aspects. They have undoubtedly increased 
the wages of the girls employed as contrasted 

^ See Annual Report of the Women's Educational and Indus- 
trial Union of Boston, and the Report of the Massachusetts Board 
of Education on Part-Time Schooling, 19 13. 



TRAINING FOR WORK 

with those of untrained saleswomen.^ But the 
lessons have done far more than this. They have 
increased the interest of the employee in her work 
and of the employer in her welfare; they have 
raised the ethical standards of buying and selling 
and the attitude of courtesy and fairness to cus- 
tomers; above all, through these private classes 
a clearer light has been thrown on the problem of 
courses and teachers for part-time schools. The 
Women's Educational and Industrial Union has 
the spirit of a true pioneer. As soon as the classes 
for employees in salesmanship were successfully 
run, the Union initiated classes to train teachers. 
The work in salesmanship requires a new kind of 
teaching. How can we get teachers? The Union 
answered by making a small beginning. Fifteen 
teachers, trained not only in the school of sales- 
manship, but by actual store practice on Mon- 
days and during holiday seasons, are already 
going out over the country to spread the knowl- 
edge of salesmanship. They hold positions in 
Chicago, Cincinnati, Kalamazoo, and Hartford, 
as well as in Boston. 

^ " Thirty-one per cent received $6 or less before the training. 
After the training, only 7 per cent received $6 and none received 
lesSc Before training, only 11.8 per cent received more than $8 
a week; after training, 42.7 per cent received more than $8 a 
week." From the Report of the Massachusetts Board of Educa^ 
tion on Part-Time Schooling, 1913. 

73 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

Such an experiment as this of the Women's Ed- 
ucational and Industrial Union deserves a central 
place in any account of private help to the schools. 
The Union foresaw a need and responded to it 
before the school authorities were ready or able 
to meet it. After six years' work they have con- 
vinced the department store manager of the value 
of such training, and through their influence two 
public high schools in Boston have begun to teach 
salesmanship. 

Though the Union's classes have necessarily 
been a large expense each year (over $3000 in 
191 1), the work has not been dropped nor shirked 
in any detail. The school keeps an exact record 
of the history of each pupil before and after her 
entrance and makes an annual record of her posi- 
tion and wages afterwards. This school in sales- 
manship is a single example of training for voca- 
tion that is being given by private associations in 
a number of cities. Such experiments are signifi- 
cant. They prove the loyalty of our citizens to 
education. They should also prove an inesti- 
mable boon to public school superintendents. 



VI 

TRAINING FOR CITIZENSHIP 

Moral Training 

More and more lovers of the public schools are 
asking that they give at least the nucleus of train- 
ing for the coming ties of civic and family life; 
and to train boys and girls for their social ties is 
necessarily to give them moral training. 

There are examples throughout the United 
States of the initiative of clear-sighted and origi- 
nal public school-teachers in carrying on definite 
plans of moral training. Miss Jane Brownlee's 
union of lessons in morals with miniature school 
citizenship, worked out in Toledo, Ohio, is well 
known and valuable. 

Acting, too, has been used in school life for dis- 
tinctly ethical purposes. Mrs. Lena D. Burton, 
with the help of Miss Marian K. Brown, a Bos- 
ton teacher, wrote for pupils to act and gave in 
several schools a genuine little morality play. 
The play, with its naive list of good and bad 
characters, shows vividly the temptations and 
final victory of ^' Every child." In South Dakota 
the adoption of a special textbook for ethical 

75 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

teaching was due to the direct cooperation of the 
superintendent of schools with the educational 
association. 

The contribution of ethical stimulus coming 
from outside the schools is also large and signi- 
ficant. Among the earHest plans for moral train- 
ing in public schools was that invented by a clergy- 
man, Mr. Milton Fairchild, then of Albany, New 
York. He realized the part of eyes as well as ears 
in receiving strong impressions, and originated 
the idea of visual instruction in morals. His most 
successful lecture, illustrating fair play in sport, 
has in many a school held thousands of lads at- 
tentive and thoughtful. Mr. Fairchild shows pic- 
ture after picture of right or wrong conduct in 
athletic games, and with each picture speaks, 
impersonally, a brief sentence or two which falls 
into the boy's memory almost without his being 
aware, so absorbed is he in the picture before 
him. 

This plan of using vivid pictures to instill and 
record moral lessons is likely to be fruitful and 
permanent. Already educational moving pic- 
tures are impressing indelible lessons through 
films such as those of the Educational Depart- 
ment of the General Film Company. A war-time 
story of the struggle between love and service to 

76 



TRAINING FOR CITIZENSHIP 

the nation rouses patriotism, the story of Enoch 
Arden drives home honor to family ties, the day's 
work of a district nurse illustrates helpfulness. 

Mr. James T. White, of New York, has offered 
his contribution to moral instruction in a plan of 
character-building through biography, a plan in- 
dorsed by the Committee of the National Educa- 
tion Association appointed to study and recom- 
mend methods of moral training in public schools. 

Insight into Civic Conditions 

The City History Club of New York has been 
in existence over eleven years and estimates its 
enrollment of children during that time as 15,000. 
It gives free classes in civics, takes children on ex- 
cursions to study places of historic importance, 
and organizes debates among its members on 
important questions of the day. Better still, the 
members of the City History Club go, in the 
charge of teachers, to meetings of the board of 
aldermen and to see actual methods of street- 
cleaning and the care of public grounds. 

The School City planned by Mr. Wilson L. Gill 
of Philadelphia has been adopted by many pub- 
lic schools. All such forms of Junior Citizen Clubs 
and School Cities are planned to give the children 
a genuine though minute knowledge of the mean- 

77 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

ing of citizenship through a taste of the experi- 
ence itself. Little children in the second grade 
surprise you by seeming to understand how to 
organize (under Mr. Gill's direction) a miniature 
city with its mayor, aldermen, common council, 
and police. Their duties, undertaken with the 
teacher's approval, are very limited, — they pick 
up papers, keep slippery banana peels off side- 
walks, order the overshoes into neat rows, and 
help to subdue whispering in school; but the re- 
sponsibiHty is genuine and definite, and under 
the right direction the child comes to realize that 
he and the city have ties and duties. 

Another spur to good citizenship is given by 
the Traveling Exhibit of the Women's Municipal 
League of Boston. This exhibit easily occupies 
a school hall. Its method might be called the 
*' Contrast of Good and Evil." Its aim is to make 
boys and girls realize the value of, and therefore 
help to support, the city regulations for health 
and decency. There are shown side by side a clean 
and a dirty market. These are of a size to fit a 
table six feet long and two and a half wide. The 
floor of the clean market is neatly covered with 
oilcloth. In a tall, upright case, glassed in, are 
shown bread and pastry, and in a low, horizontal 
case, also under glass, food that is to be eaten 

78 



TRAINING FOR CITIZENSHIP 

without cooking, — celery, candies, cakes, and 
berries. 

The dirty market is a lurid contrast to the 
clean one. Heaven and hell could not be farther 
apart. A worn overcoat rests upon the table and 
touches the food. Wilting salads and speckled 
candy are exposed, and metal flies on stickpins 
cry out against the evil state. Soiled newspapers 
are on hand for wrapping-paper. A papier-mache 
dog is poking into the vegetable boxes on the 
floor. 

In addition to the clean and dirty market- 
stands, the Traveling Exhibit shows models of 
well-kept and of badly kept tenements, photo- 
graphs of clean and dirty streets and barns; and 
cases made for keeping milk cool and clean at 
small cost. There are also photographs of classes 
at work in trade schools and charts showing 
where such teaching is given. 

The head-masters and teachers in the Boston 
high and grammar schools welcome this exhibit 
and make application to have it placed in their 
schools for a week or more at a time. Every day 
after the school session the children troop in to 
hear talks about each part of the show. Inter- 
ested teachers often have their classes write com- 
positions on what they have seen. Many children 
79 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

of foreign-speaking parents are already buyers for 
the family. One of the older pupils writes: — 

One day as I was standing in a small grocery store 
a girl came in and bought some oysterettes. After she 
had gone out, as the storekeeper was putting the box 
back in its place he dropped it, and the oysterettes 
were scattered all over a very dirty floor where every 
one that came into the store walked. He picked them 
up, put them into the box, and I asked if he could sell 
the crackers now, and he said, " Of course. What else 
should I do with them? " 1 should n't care to buy in 
that store now, as I should imagine that other things 
and uncleanly things might be done. 

Appointment by Merit 
A different type of training for citizenship is 
carried on by the Women's Civil Service Reform 
Associations in Maryland, New York, and Mas- 
sachusetts. An important part of the work of 
these societies is to give teachers help in training 
children to reject the spoils system in public of- 
fice and to see the value of appointment by merit. 
Excellent pamphlets have been written by men 
of the distinction of President Charles W. Eliot 
and Charles J. Bonaparte. These, with other 
articles simply written for children of the high 
school and later grammar grades, are widely used 
as lessons and material for compositions. The 
80 



TRAINING FOR CITIZENSHIP 

auxiliaries do not confine their work to schools 
within their own State. They answer requests 
from every State in the Union. One auxiliary 
alone distributed during its eleven years of exist- 
ence half a million pamphlets. One hundred and 
fifty thousand of these were sent to grammar 
schools and nearly two hundred thousand to high 
schools. In every case the principal agreed to 
make them the subject of a special lesson. In a 
number of schools a speaking contest is held at the 
end of the season, and a bronze medal designed 
by a pupil of Saint-Gaudens and bearing the 
motto, ^'The Best shall serve the State," is given 
for the strongest paper in favor of civil service 
reform. 

It is a moving sight to see a boy of fourteen 
stand on a platform before a large audience of cit- 
izens and eloquently point out the value of ap- 
pointment by merit. It is still more significant 
when an enthusiastic teacher, using the pamphlets 
on civil service reform, spurs her class to a zealous 
interest in good government. I recall a teacher in 
a small city whose boys became so animated over 
right methods of government that their teacher 
let the class appoint a committee of three to study 
commission government. Armed with questions 
prepared by the class, the three delegates, pale 
8i 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

and eager, visited the commissioners of a neigh- 
boring city who received them courteously, if 
with a smile breaking the firm contour of their 
lips. Back came the boys ready to support gov- 
ernment by commission, and, what is more, 
roused to a genuine interest concerning the po- 
litical duties in which they were soon to take 
part. 

From the superintendent of schools in Arkan- 
sas City, as from many other cities, comes a 
message such as the following: — 

We will gladly promise to use the pamphlets ac- 
cording to your stipulations; that is, make them the 
subject of study in at least one lesson in civics or his- 
tory. They will be so helpful in our work in civics 
and history that I feel we ought to make a large place 
in our program for a careful study of them. 

In the report of the National Municipal League 
for 1907 a notice is given of this work: — 

In Massachusetts the Women's Auxiliary of the 
Civil Service Reform Association has rendered splen- 
did service in the cause of good government. It has 
fairly deluged the state with knowledge of the merit 
system and built up a powerful public opinion in 
favor of clean and just conditions. It did not enter 
politics but helped to give politics a moral basis. It 
started its work in the right place in the Massachu- 
82 



TRAINING FOR CITIZENSHIP 

setts public schools in building up the good citizen- 
ship on which the future of a government by the peo- 
ple depends. That kind of work is fundamental and 
is peculiarly the work of women. 

A Course in Citizenship 
In the spring of 1913, the schools of Roxbury, 
Massachusetts, and its neighborhood were star- 
tled by a children's strike against the new rule of 
double school sessions. Boys and girls broke win- 
dows, battered doors, howled, and made night 
hideous. The revolt was soon quelled, but its sig- 
nificance, as a symptom of an age of restlessness 
and lawlessness, cannot soon be forgotten. What 
can be done in the schools to prepare our future 
citizens for a life of loyalty, order, sympathy, and 
service? One answer has taken definite shape in 
a set of stories, poems, and suggestions for talks 
to children called "A Course in Citizenship," 
planned by the Massachusetts Branch of the 
American School Peace League. The aim of this 
course is to rouse and sustain in children the 
practice of good will. 

For two thousand years the words peace and 
good will have been associated together. Peace- 
ableness is an elderly, a sleepy kind of virtue. 
Good will is the active side of peace, and a virtue 

83 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

far more appealing to youth. The intent of the 
course in citizenship is to develop in the lives of 
children, from the first grade to the end of the 
eighth, an enlarging sympathy through service. 
The first grades accent ties of home, school, and 
playground, but with the third comes a wider ap- 
peal to good will toward the neighborhood. Grad- 
ually, as the child's interests enlarge year by 
year, ties to the city, state, nation, and the world 
are dwelt upon. The authors of this course in 
citizenship hope that through sympathy and serv- 
ice to home, neighbor, or nation these great ties 
will be so honored and loved that they cannot 
wantonly be hurt. 

This course in citizenship illustrates direct and 
effective interworking of the school and the pub- 
lic. Suggested by the Massachusetts Branch of 
the School Peace League, prepared largely by 
teachers acting in a private capacity, indorsed 
by superintendents all over the United States, 
it finds its way to valuable service in the public 
schools. 



VII 

TRAINING FOR FAMILY TIES 

It has long been the line of least resistance to let 
boys and girls grow up haphazard about their 
future ties to one another. This silence is no 
conspiracy, it is just the opposite. It is a lack 
of thoughtful and noble conspiracy among the 
fathers, mothers, older friends, and teachers to 
bring to boys and girls the best there is to 
give in solution of the most difficult and en- 
riching problem in life. This failure to untwist 
and direct the ties of youth is natural enough. It 
takes a patient and a delicate hand to disentangle 
a wandering vine of clematis that has wound itself 
about a cedar instead of climbing up the pillar 
prepared to hold it. It is not a matter of untwin- 
ing one tendril only, but many, and if you are im- 
patient, they break and the young leaves wither. 
A strand mingled of right and wrong instincts 
holds back Americans from talk about love and 
religion. Rightly men feel that knowledge of 
facts is not enough. Rightly they feel that reli- 
gion and love are hurt unless they are spoken of 
from above the level of ordinary living and by 
8s 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

one who knows whereof he speaks. Certain 
truths cannot be spoken by polluted lips, and be- 
cause our daily thoughts are on the level of bread, 
butter, clothes, and dollars, there seems to be 
no good time to speak of sex. No good time, — 
that's just it; but it is we, not the time, that is 
not good enough. On the other hand, our drift- 
ing silence is often weakness rather than strength. 
There is a shirking tendency in me to shift the re- 
sponsibility off on you. Neither of us will ever be 
wise enough to speak, nor good enough, yet the 
task must be undertaken. Time and youth wait 
for no man. A boy outgrows his coat. The 
sleeves get tighter and tighter as he grows longer 
and larger, till something tears. Boys and girls 
grow up day by day, outgrowing old feehngs and 
forming new ones in relation to each other; the 
special moment to speak is not insistent till it is 
forced by a danger signal. Something tears. 

Sex Education 

In the last ten years the schools, feeling almost 
overwhelmingly the need of all resources in meet- 
ing this intricate problem, have called for help, 
and the lovers of youth in unofficial places have 
suggested the best they know (often pitifully lit- 
tle, indeed !) by way of support. So tentative as 
86 



TRAINING FOR FAMILY TIES 

yet is this movement for training of social stand- 
ards that the available facts barely convey the 
significance of its depth, its range, its persistence. 
Ask yourselves what, in your own experience, it 
has been that kept you at the best and freed you 
from temptation in personal relations? You will 
find answers that apply also to what the public 
schools and intelligent friends of the schools can 
be trained to give. 

1. Sufficient knowledge to dispel false information 
aixd to impress the need of moral steadfastness 
in difficult situations. 

2 . The heightening of standards through friendship 
with lovable people and books. 

3. Practice under guidance in a varied range of 
common social interests. 

The most assertive and often the least success- 
ful of the attempts to train boys and girls for their 
future family life are these of direct instruction 
in what is f acilely and falsely called sex hygiene. 
Here and there, indeed, a skillful, big-hearted 
man or woman, — a doctor, it may be, or a leader 
of the Young Women's Christian Association, — 
clears, with the rain of cool, scientific fact, the 
dusty bypaths of unclean speculation. Such help 
is needed to cure morbidness of body or mind. 
Straight facts turn aside crooked wonderings. 

.87 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

Yet knowledge is but a paper shield to with- 
stand the piercing sword of temptation. Officers 
in the army warning their soldiers of the danger 
to health forbid them to drink from polluted 
streams. A present thirst drives future sickness 
into dim oblivion. Every doctor knows that raw 
oysters may carry germs of typhoid fever. Do 
doctors eschew raw oysters? 

Knowledge of sex issues must be far more than 
knowledge ; it must be education, not information ; 
for information, if it goes no farther, does not 
move to right action. ''Let me steer you along 
these dangerous rocks." So far good, but you 
must row while I steer. If there is no one puUing 
hard at the oar, steering is impotent. Moral Hfe 
must be in motion before we can even help to 
guide it. Therefore, instinctively and wisely, 
playground leaders, folk-dancers, managers of 
boys' and girls' clubs, have roused and shared 
enthusiasm for games before they began to offer 
moral help. The longest way round is here the 
shortest way home, for knocking at a closed door 
does not constitute admission to the house of a 
soul. The knowledge boys and girls need is not 
plain facts but illumined facts. They need two 
things that may be called knowledge, though 
they include far more than knowledge. First, 



TRAINING FOR FAMILY TIES 

like a chauffeur handling a powerful machine, 
they need to know, ''Round this corner there is 
a dangerous hill, — view obscured, — drive care- 
fully"; and next and far more important, they 
need to see down a vista into the nature of hu- 
man ties. Such vision can best come through 
intimacy with a wiser friend. 

Among the best teaching united to friendship 
with girls and boys I place that of Miss Laura 
Garrett, of New York. She is giving herself 
liberally to help parents, teachers, children. Her 
teaching has the quality of geniality, variety, 
picturesqueness, and above all, humor, — a qual- 
ity often forgotten in the earnest presentation of 
a strained subject. The quality of humor is not 
strained. In Denver the Mothers' Congress ini- 
tiated and supported the work of Mrs. Anna 
Noble in teaching a group of girls in the seventh 
and eighth grades. The classes met by permis- 
sion of the school committee in the assembly 
room. Play and comradeship together evolved 
intimacy. There were days for picnics, basket- 
ball, folk-dancing, and talks on general hygiene. 
The classes came to include girls from twelve to 
nineteen years of age. More and more circles of 
girls were formed to meet the demand. Inciden- 
tally questions of right and wrong in the relation 
89 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

of one sex to the other arose. The meaning and 
place of conventions and the ideals of friendship 
and family were discussed. After some time, the 
school board, seeing the value of her work, gave 
Mrs. Noble an office in the high school. Here 
parents and daughters came to ask help, or 
daughters brought a note from their mothers 
asking Mrs. Noble to talk with them. 

Finally, in 1913, the school board adopted Mrs. 
Noble's plan. She now works especially with 
high school girls helping them to meet in the best 
way, both physically and mentally, their coming 
social ties. Mrs. Noble centers her talks about 
the idea of service and brings up the following 
topics: — 

Responsibilities of a Girl 

Grades Nine and Ten 
Work — 

The joy of work well done. Good work depend- 
ent upon good tools. The body the tool of the 
mind and spirit. Physical hygiene and develop- 
ment. 

Inheritance and Environment — 

What we are and what we may be. Responsi- 
bility to the future generation. Building up of de- 
sirable traits. Elimination of undesirable. 
90 



TRAINING FOR FAMILY TIES 

Responsibility and Work — 

(a) Social — 

Choice of friends. Making of social standards. 
Proper amusements. Expense. Dress. Chaper- 
onage. Responsibility of the thoughtful girl to the 
girl with false social standards. 

(b) Industrial — 

Choice of vocation. Dangers to girls in the busi- 
ness world. Responsibility of the girl in the safe 
sheltered position to the girl in danger. 

(c) Home — 

The girl's relation to her own home and to the 
home-making of the future. 

Grades Eleven and Twelve 
Home-making and Child Study 
The Home — 

Economic standards of home-making. ^ 
Hygiene of the home. 
Beauty of the home. 

Ideal mental and spiritual relationships of the 
home. 

The Child — 

Physical development. Proper clothing, bath- 
ing, food, sleep, exercise, and environment. 
Mental development. Cultivation of the will. 

The State — 

The home hygenic, the home beautiful, the home 

91 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

moral in relation to the life of the community and 
state. 

The child mentally, morally and physically de- 
veloped, a unit in an ideal community and state 
life. 

Health is always health to do something with. 
Even moral health, the power to resist tempta- 
tion, is not to be sought in lonely self-cultivation, 
but for an aim, a place, a person, a vision. Mrs. 
Noble wisely adds to her talks about hygiene 
that of the choice of work and the care of little 
children. We cannot hold steady against tempta- 
tion unless we are supported by something we 
love and look up to. At the root of all her work 
Mrs. Noble places friendship. 

Supervised Recreation 
In the last century medical school training 
meant chiefly book- work. Now it gains strength 
by the actual practice of medicine under direc- 
tion. So the best training in social ties is that 
of practice under guidance. A number of private 
societies in different cities are preparing boys and 
girls for better ties of friendship and affection by 
bringing groups of them together in the school 
buildings, under careful supervision, for choral 
singing, theatricals, dancing and other games. 
92 



TRAINING FOR FAMILY TIES 

Boys and girls just out of school or at part- 
time work are hungry for society, so hungry 
that, like most of us, if they can't get the best, 
they will seize the less good. In one large school- 
house, whose use is granted by the school com- 
mittee, the private society which runs the dances 
issues an attractive red -lettered program of 
dances, thus: — 

Abraham Lincoln School. 

Supervised Public Dances. 

Every Saturday Evening. 

Waltz. 

Two Step. 

Schottische. 

Dancing Regulations, 

The management reserves the right to stop 
any improper dancing. The position known as 
the waltz position shall be observed. The tur- 
key trot, or one step, will not be permitted. 

An important though indirect way of training 
for ties of friendship is that of giving boys and 
girls keen interests and resources in common. In 
Boston an experiment in social training, wholly 
initiated and run by a private association, was 
after a year's trial adopted by the city schools. 
In October, 191 1, the Committee on the Extended 
Use of School Buildings of the Women's Munici- 

93 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

pal League of Boston opened a social center in 
the East Boston High School. The school board 
gave the use of the building, heating and light, 
the committee paid the janitor's fee and all other 
expenses. The League's committee looked all 
over the country for a director with the right so- 
cial ideals and training for just this work. The 
condition was made that the director should live 
near the High School and learn to know the neigh- 
borhood intimately before the center opened. 
During the summer the director made inquiries 
about the musical talent of the neighborhood, and 
when the social center opened in the autumn, he 
was able to secure members for several strong 
musical clubs. Two glee clubs were formed, — 
one of young women and one of young men, with 
a membership of about forty each; two orches- 
tras, — one for beginners and one advanced 
enough to give entertainments; a drum corps of 
lads from fourteen to sixteen years old, and a 
brass band of eighteen instruments. The initia- 
tive of the muscial clubs was felt in every part of 
the social center. They formed a natural nucleus 
organized at the outset. During the autumn a 
girls' folk-dancing class of seventy with a trained 
teacher, a young men^s athletic club, and two 
dramatic clubs were organized. The girls were 

94 



TRAINING FOR FAMILY TIES 

given classes in plain and decorative sewing, and 
thirty of the younger girls were taught games, 
stories and songs, paper-cutting, brass-work, and 
hammock - making, such as they might use in 
playground instruction or in vacation schools. 

All the members thought of these clubs as their 
own; they contributed weekly dues; they paid by 
installment for the musical instruments and the 
sewing material. The spirit was not that of 
classes, but of clubs, — clubs each with a respon- 
sible president and treasurer, a constitution and 
rules. Not at first, but after the leaders had cre- 
ated social standards, the young men and women 
were brought together through a series of dances. 
These were well managed by an alert committee 
of club members. All who saw the large gymna- 
sium full of happy and orderly young men and 
women must have felt the value of opening school- 
houses in the evening with clubs under trained 
leaders. In many neighborhoods there is no other 
meeting-place but the street or the public dance- 
halls. One young man told the Committee on the 
Extended Use of School Buildings that these 
dances gave him the only opportunity he had had 
since leaving school to make the right kind of 
friends. 

The East Boston Center proved so successful 

95 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

that the school committee adopted both its policy 
and its director and maintains four of a similar 
character in different parts of the city. 

It is significant that in this case (as in a num- 
ber of others in Chicago and New York) the work 
of the private association did not end with the 
adoption of its evening center by the city. The 
school committee at once asked the members of 
the Municipal League's Committee on the Ex- 
tended Use of School Buildings to become an ad- 
visory committee on evening centers. It asked 
the League to keep definitely in touch with each 
center, suggest any improvements they found de- 
sirable, and rouse the active support of the neigh- 
borhood. The League accepted this responsibil- 
ity, secured a woman of generous, sympathetic 
nature to interest the neighborhood in the suc- 
cess of its own center and gave the services of 
two placement secretaries to talk with boys and 
girls already at work who came to the center for 
recreation and advice. 

The Choice of Books 

In one of 0. Henry's short stories there is a 
touching sketch of an underpaid salesgirl, living 
alone in a sordid hall bedroom with a single treas- 
ure in it, — a flaring picture of Lord Kitchener 

96 



TRAINING FOR FAMILY TIES 

in full regimentals. Temptation in the shape of 
an alluring invitation to fun, food and dancing 
assails her, but she takes a look at Lord Kitch- 
ener, and the glory of the hero whom she barely 
knows, but adores for his looks and deeds, holds 
her steady. The hope that art and literature of 
the kind to nourish a simple hungry soul may re- 
vive and sustain ideals has been a spur to many 
a helper of the public school. Throughout the 
country librarians are quietly, persistently, and 
devotedly suggesting the reading of books that 
give ideals of friendship. Librarians and their 
assistants realize daily what good and bad choices 
in children's reading may involve. In the Chil- 
dren's Room of a library situated in one of the 
roughest districts of a large city is a far-seeing 
librarian. Her soul is on fire to give the children 
who visit her room the kind of story and novel 
that will give true and loyal standards of love 
and friendship. She does not think her duty 
ended with stamping the date on a card. She is 
constantly talking with the boys and girls about 
the books they read, why they choose them, what 
they get from them. She is hungry to find more 
books that will open up, through biography or 
romance, the right kind of human ties. 
The experiment has been tried by a worker 
97 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

in the Boston Children's Aid Society of a course 
in novels. She takes interesting novels that give 
opportunity for a discussion of the ties between 
men and women and talks them over with a small 
group of girls. Her experience leads her to believe 
that this method is one of real value. Biography, 
too, is a largely un tilled field in which lie the seeds 
of human experience in love and marriage. For 
those who do not easily read, story- telling and the 
vivid scenes of the educational pictures of the bi- 
ograph give an excellent chance to bring future 
experience home. We are not yet using the re- 
sources of modern invention for the greatest edu- 
cational ends, but these resources lie open to the 
genius who will see and command their uses in 
moral training. Will not some one take a few of 
the moving dramas of self-control, loyalty, devo- 
tion between men and women, and make them 
available to impress standards of reverence, honor, 
and constancy on the lives of our boys and girls? 

Indirect Training for Social Responsibility 

The examples given above suggest a few of the 
varied ways in which volunteers are trying to 
back the schools in their efforts to train and de- 
velop true relations between boys and girls. The 
greatest hope in this training for family ties 

98 



TRAINING FOR FAMILY TIES 

springs out of the eagerness, thoughtfulness, and 
wide variety of the people who now are looking 
the problem in the face instead of staring at its 
back. We find associations of many kinds each 
doing its part, directly or indirectly, to solve this 
problem. Home and school associations bring 
parents and teachers together in social meetings. 
The talks about children's health or work lead 
naturally and in many cases effectively to the dis- 
cussion of more subtle problems. Young Men's 
and Young Women's Christian Associations 
bring to bear the purifying forces of their reli- 
gious zeal. Social settlements constantly use 
their games and clubs for deeper intimacy, and, 
through parents, older brothers and sisters, or 
through the children themselves, reinforce the 
public schools. 

More and more wise men and women see that 
discussion of disease or fear of consequences is an 
antiseptic treatment that may kill healthy tissues 
along with the diseased. It is aseptic treatment, 
purification of the soul as by fire and water, 
through work, through athletics, through friend- 
ship, through loyalty to family ties, through ab- 
sorbing ideals, that is the mainstay of the schools 
themselves and of those who try to help them. 
These are the temptations to right doing whose 
99 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

music deafens to the siren lure of wrong. And 
therefore, when we trace back to its roots the un- 
flagging zeal of a volunteer playground leader, we 
find his faith that through the opening of play 
the secrets of boy hearts will be revealed. To each 
boy he gives the deeper secret of a man's experi- 
ence of life. 

The classes in salesmanship, carried on by the 
Women's Educational and Industrial Union of 
Boston, are primarily a training for work in de- 
partment stores, but ask the eager director if 
that is the center of her interest. ^'No, indeed. 
What we do trains the girl for all her future life. 
Questions of right and wrong, questions of good 
manners, questions of habit, are constantly aris- 
ing and we have a chance to talk them out with 
the girls. You would be surprised to hear how 
often they say, in response to some suggestion of 
improvement, 'Why, yes, that's right! I never 
thought of it before.'" 

The home and school visitor, engaged by the 
Public Education Association of a large city, finds 
the teacher troubled about an unmanageable girl 
of fifteen. She is beginning to run away in the 
evening and stay away from home till late at night. 
One evening about eleven o'clock, she is seen 
crouching at the top of a high fire-escape. The 

100 



TRAINING FOR FAMILY TIES 

school visitor lures her down, wins her confidence, 
and finds that the cause of her wild flight is dread 
of being whipped by her Italian stepfather. Talks 
with the parents and the older sister, a growing 
friendship with the girl herself, may well save her 
from dangerous practices and lead her back to 
safety. In the hope of those volunteers who 
guide and pay for home and school visitors the 
part of friendship in strengthening character 
and preparing it to meet its coming ties is deep, 
strong and central. 

The Hawthorne Club of Boston offered in 1913 
a prize for the best answers to a series of questions 
on good and bad recreation. Teachers in the pub- 
lic schools encouraged their pupils to answer 
these questions, and the result was a bulky pack- 
age of several hundred papers expressing, im- 
maturely, of course, but with thoughtfulness and 
common sense, the ideals of boys and girls about 
social ties and pleasures. They wanted fun, they 
believed in dances, but at public dances you 
"heard bad things said"; you were thrown with 
people you could not trust. The girls definitely 
suggested good dance-halls where there were 
matrons and no drinking. They distinguished 
the right kind of moving-picture show from the 
wrong. 

lOI 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

To write spontaneously on any subject plants 
one's ideas with stronger roots. As, among the 
judges, I read the papers of this group, I felt, de- 
spite a burst here and there of marvelous *'high- 
falutin" language designed to win the prize, that 
moral thoughtfulness about recreation was being 
both expressed and impressed. 

In Wisconsin, Professor Frank C. Sharp, of the 
State University, has started classes for ethical 
discussion in a number of the high schools of 
the State. Through these discussions training in 
logical thinking is gained. But something more 
intimate than logic springs up when we discuss the 
sources of lasting happiness and the conditions of 
true friendship. 

People speak sweepingly of our age as a time 
of commercialism. It doubtless has this phase 
among many others, but there are deep springs of 
human hope and will that no drought of cynicism 
or commercialism can dry. Through blighting 
days they leap with unquenchable power. With 
an ancient evil springs an eternal conscience. The 
perpetual desire of good men and women is to sus- 
tain and strengthen the ties of family life. It is 
only within the last years that this desire has ex- 
pressed itself in efforts to help the public schools. 



102 



TRAINING FOR FAMILY TIES 

Mistakes will be made, but, carefully watched, 
these very mistakes will be of significance, and, 
carefully guided, the movement, seen as a whole, 
cannot but accomplish good. 



VIII 

NEW DEMANDS ON THE SCHOOLS 

As the array of offerings from the private citizen 
to the school is spread before him, the superin- 
tendent may respond, "All this have I done." It 
is probably true that somewhere in the United 
States the schools are already carrying on some- 
thing of all the experiments initiated in other 
towns by private associations. In the City of 
New Idea, Mr. Swift Progress has of his own ac- 
cord started recreation centers, placement bu- 
reaus, open-air rooms, but it is equally true that 
in Wayback Center, the superintendent, Mr. 
Move Slowly, would never have accomplished 
anything if it had not been for the Coming Era 
Club under the presidency of Mrs. Urgent. We 
cannot cleave a sharp line between what the 
schools themselves are doing and what private 
associations and individuals are doing for the 
schools. That we cannot is itself significant. It 
means that what outsiders are offering to the 
schools is, on the whole, of such value that it 
has already taken root in one or more progressive 
104 



NEW DEMANDS ON THE SCHOOLS 

schools. What was once a ''fad" has become a 
''feature." 

In her Helping School Children,^ Miss Denison 
gives a striking list of activities begun in social set- 
tlements and now taken over by many schools : — 

/. Settlement II. School 

Study rooms. Study-recreation rooms. 
Clubs, civic, social, educational. Clubs, civic, social, educational. 

Entertainments. Social center parties. 

Kindergartens. Public kindergartens. 

Athletics. Public school athletic leagues. 

Relief. School relief associations. 

Clinics. Medical and dental inspection. 

Visiting nurses. School nurses. 

Music. School orchestras. 

Gardens. School gardens. 

Playgrounds. School playgrounds. 

Home visitors. Visiting teachers. 

Vacation schools. Vacation schools. 

Night schools. Night schools. 

Open-air classes. Open-air classes. 

This list is important because it marks the suc- 
cess of many a pioneer effort of private associa- 
tions to further the ideals of the schools. Here is a 
rich harvest. We have no reason to suppose that 
the contribution of the next fifty years will be in 
any way less. Properly cultivated and fertilized 
by encouragement from the schools, it is likely to 
be far larger. That the school authorities need 
to cultivate, prune, train, and enjoy the fruits of 
bounteous private gifts is my central thesis. As 

1 Page 1 6. 

105 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

we face the school situation, such a conclusion 
seems necessary. 

Two salient facts jut out in public school edu- 
cation at the beginning of the twentieth century. 

1. That the so-called social activities of the school 
— movements for health, vocation, recreation, 
morals, citizenship — are making new demands 
on the strength of the teachers and the financial 
resources of the city. 

2. That it is precisely in movements such as these 
that the wide-awake public is interested and 
ready to spend money and strength. 

Put these two facts together and the moral is 
almost inevitable. We must train the interested 
public to give its money and its strength wisely. 

Schools as Centers of Great Expectations 

That the most progressive teachers and the 
city finances are overworked by the new demands 
on them, few people will doubt. The tidal wave 
of social service in the schools has come so fast 
that it has swept away all standards of regular 
hours and of old-time expenditure for schools. 
*'0h, yes, we give three evenings a week to voca- 
tional guidance now," said cheerfully a city prin^ 
cipal. "No teacher expects to have his evenings 
free any longer.'* The demand on the financial 
io6 



NEW DEMANDS ON THE SCHOOLS 

resources of poorer towns and cities is more and 
more being felt. In a number of instances, the 
State, following the lead of Massachusetts, is be- 
ing called on to bear half the maintenance of ap- 
proved vocational schools, but even with this aid, 
those towns that are rich in children and poor in 
property are feeling the strain of the new work. 
Some adjustment must be made, for the call 
for supervision by the schools of health, social 
life, play, vocational guidance and placement, is 
growing, not declining. 

In February, 1909, I heard Mr. Henry Thurs- 
ton, first probation officer of the juvenile court in 
Chicago, plead eloquently that the school should 
be the single authority in all social projects for 
children. Teachers, he said, know the conditions 
of juvenile crime and truancy. They should have 
charge of playgrounds. They must organize and 
carry on evening recreation centers. It is they 
who should give out licenses for newsboys and 
issue age certificates which will allow children to 
enter factories. 

During the same month I heard Mr. Gustave 
Straubenmiiller, of New York, and Mr. Edward 
Ward, then of Rochester, speak of the extended 
use of school buildings. They assured us that the 
school must no longer be open only by day, — 
107 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

that it must reach out to help graduates and to 
give parents a place to talk over all that they 
want to talk about. Mr. Straubenmiiller showed 
us a hundred lantern slides illustrating the use of 
the schools for all. We saw babies in swings and 
old men reading newspapers. We saw games of 
tennis and lessons in cooking. Everywhere the 
same ideal was insisted upon, — that our schools 
should serve all the people all the time, summer 
and winter, day and evening. 

Early in March a new impetus from the edu- 
cation current came to me, through a speech be- 
fore the Harvard Teachers' Association, by Mr. 
Henry Holmes, instructor in pedagogy. His sub- 
ject was ''Educational Progress in 1908," and 
so much progress had he found that it required 
fourteen thousand words to express it in con- 
densed form. 

He assured us that the best schools are under- 
taking to look after the health of all children. 
Teachers are learning how to test eyes and ears. 
School nurses are driving out contagious diseases. 
In some schools a dentist's chair is permanently 
estabHshed. Following abreast of the great 
march toward health, Boston and Providence 
have supplied an open-air school for tubercular 
and delicate children. Beginnings are seen of an 
108 



NEW DEMANDS ON THE SCHOOLS 

exodus of city schools toward the parks. Schools 
in hospitals and schools in the juvenile court are 
no longer dreams. 

Not only health, but art and training for work 
are becoming a part of school. We are coming to 
appreciate the value of the dramatic instinct in 
children. President Eliot prophesies that all our 
public schools will, before many years, train their 
classes to express themselves through acting. 

Most important of all, in its school outlook, is 
the new movement for vocational guidance. The 
time is coming when the teacher will not say 
good-bye to his pupils when at fourteen they leave 
the school. He will follow his graduates; equip 
them for and assist them toward useful work. 

Mr. Holmes's report of educational progress 
was made five years ago. Since that time the 
continuation school movement, including the 
supervision of all children until they are sixteen 
or seventeen, has become possible through state 
laws in Ohio and Massachusetts; the actual 
placement of children in employment has begun 
under close connection with the school authori- 
ties in Cincinnati, Chicago, and Boston, and the 
movement in favor of direct training for citizen- 
ship is rapidly spreading. Not one of the so- 
called "modern fads" has been dropped; indeed, 
109 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

round the roots of the kindergarten has grown up a 
small, energetic sprout of the Montessori method. 
The pubHc school-teacher has become the cen- 
ter of great expectations in the community. She 
is expected to be the creator and guardian of 
health, morals, intelligence, and efhciency in the 
rising generation. But experience shows that no 
one can succeed alone in such an all-embracing 
task. The greatest general fails without an army; 
the most brilliant surgeon cannot run a hospi- 
tal without cooks, nurses, ward-tenders, assistant 
physicians. Public school-teachers, facing both 
technical and human problems, need the experi- 
ence and the aid of the intelligent public and of 
the expert. They need the dentist as they meet 
the question of decaying teeth; they need the wise 
mother as they try to adjust school lessons to 
adolescence; they need the experienced business 
man as they undertake to guide graduating pupils 
into some fitting work. And by a miracle of inter- 
play, here at the needed moment are a number of 
doctors, lawyers, industrial chiefs ready to take 
hold and help. The interplay is not accidental, it 
is a miracle of response, — the magic of love meet- 
ing love. Suddenly, as the school has seen its 
need of the community, the community has seen 
its need of serving the school. 



IX 

THE SPHERE OF VOLUNTEER HELP 

Any such account of demand in the school and 
supply to the school, as has been brought to- 
gether here, gets meaning only as we ask and 
answer the searching Tolstoyan question, "What 
must we do, then?" 

It is my belief that all heads of public schools 
should adopt a definite policy of understanding, 
sifting, encouraging, and finally training vol- 
unteer help to the schools. Every town has its 
woman's club, its churches, its library, its guilds; 
probably its board of trade; surely, its public- 
spirited doctor, farmer, or tradesman, and many 
a mother with a sheaf of garnered experience to 
offer. 

Every school principal, in these days of extra 
classroom activities, needs volunteer helpers, or, 
better still, expert helpers whose salaries are 
given by a lay association. The principal needs a 
home and school visitor to see the parents, who 
cannot easily get to school. He can gain by hav- 
ing a playground leader and some one who sings 
well to help in his choral classes. He will be greatly 
III 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

helped by advice from an architect about the 
new schoolhouse or by a business man about bids 
for coal. He will hardly be able to afford to open 
the school buildings for evening recreation un- 
less he has help from mothers willing to chaperon 
the girls and from volunteer athletic or dramatic 
leaders. He cannot give the time necessary to 
find out about different factories and stores in the 
neighborhood. He needs a trained worker to help 
him in advising his boys and girls about their 
future work. 

Part of the help he needs will be expert serv- 
ice, the salary for which may well be contrib- 
uted by a woman's club or by the chamber of 
commerce. Much of it will be help from trained 
amateurs, for the trained amateur has come to 
stay in the field of school work. The amateur, 
rightly counseled, is of permanent help. He, or 
more commonly she, has leisure, has a fresh point 
of view, is untrammeled by tradition, has loose- 
tied purse-strings, has often irritating energy of 
persistence, has many fingers to put in the school 
pie. The amateur is a thorn in the flesh to the 
sleepy superintendent whose cry is the drone of 
* ' lass mich schlaf en. ' ' The amateur is a mule team 
on a sandy road to the progressive superintendent. 
She drags his store of ideas to their destined scene 

112 



THE SPHERE OF VOLUNTEER HELP 

of action. In moments of despair she is a magic 
wand. From dark caves, unknown to him, she 
brings forth pots of gold, and his eyes sparkle as 
he knows that he can now fulfill his cherished 
dream. 

The power to use amateur help well is a sign of 
the wisdom and skill of a modern superintend- 
ent as it is of a charity expert who is training vol- 
unteers. The teacher must take a definite atti- 
tude toward the volunteer help pouring into the 
schools. Genially he must both take down and 
uplift the soaring volunteer. He must show the 
enthusiast for a single reform how small a part 
it necessarily is of the whole school system and 
how much good it can do if wisely and proportion- 
ately worked out. Volunteers cannot be treated, 
as they often have been, like a swarm of gnats, 
noisy, irritating, quickly to be brushed away. 
The superintendent must choose and develop the 
best forms of cooperation between the lay man 
or woman and the schools. 

What, then, is the rightful sphere of private 
helpfulness? 

I. To initiate and support new experiments in 
education is one of the best ways in which out- 
siders can help the schools. Kindergartens, va- 
cation schools, social centers illustrate this well. 

113 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

Mrs. Quincy Shaw maintained kindergartens in 
Boston until their value for the public schools was 
proved and a supply of good teachers trained. 
Vacation schools were held by settlements, civic 
leagues, and similar associations until the city 
saw their value. As yet the placement bureau is 
not recognized as a necessary part of the school. 
It is well, therefore, that in Chicago the expense 
is borne by private societies while the work is 
directly under the supervision of the school com- 
mittee. 

2. Private citizens, or groups who are masters 
within a special field, ought to give expert 
service to the schools. In the Normal School at 
Fitchburg, Massachusetts, the training of stu- 
dents to appreciate good music has been one of 
the aims of the principal. This interest in music 
has drawn the city and the school together. The 
Kneisel Quartette has come to play at the school, 
support from the townspeople carrying part of 
the expense. In many cases associations for nurs- 
ing have contributed the first school nurse, giv- 
ing freely her expert service. This has been the 
case in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; in Denver, 
Colorado; in Reading, Pennsylvania; and in Mid- 
dle town, Connecticut. 

The expert business man interested in schools 
114 



THE SPHERE OF VOLUNTEER HELP 

can in these days be of value in suggesting and di- 
recting lines of industrial training. He knows, as 
the school man cannot, the kind of work that a 
business man wants from his boys and girls, the 
occupations that are open and those already over- 
crowded. For years high schools have gone on 
training an over - supply of stenographers and 
clerks. The closer link between school and shop 
is bringing out the value of fitting round pegs 
into round holes, instead of forcing square pegs 
into no holes at all. In Kearney, New Jersey, the 
superintendent writes : — 

Last year the leading manufacturing concerns 
were asked to criticize the product of our schools and 
to make suggestions how to remedy any faults or de- 
fects in our teaching. These letters brought startling 
replies. The manufacturers were unanimous in their 
opinion that the school work in the "three Rs" was 
not thorough and adequate. Through this valuable 
criticism, placed before our principals as a cabinet, 
we formulated entirely new plan s, which have resulted 
in most gratifying improvements.^ 

3. Even more important than the help given 

by experts in a special field is the close affiliation 

of the schools with a strong sensible organization 

like the educational department of a board of 

* Elsa Denison, Helping School Children, p. 304. 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

trade or a woman's club. This alliance, developed 
and guided by a wise teacher, may double his 
power. In our large cities such associations are 
growing stronger and becoming more definite in 
purpose. They are welcomed by far-seeing su- 
perintendents and teachers. Parent and teacher 
associations taking root, now feebly, now vigor- 
ously, are recognized as allies to the public schools. 

In New York the Public Education Association 
has worked actively for recreation centers, for 
teachers' resting - rooms, for sufficient kinder- 
gartens, for vocational training and guidance, for 
playgrounds, for development of interest in pic- 
tures and natural history, for visiting teachers, 
for school lunches. Back of all its work has been 
the purpose to study and to understand the school 
system. 

In Cincinnati the women's clubs and other pri- 
vate associations work intimately with the pubHc 
schools and with the State University and Train- 
ing School for teachers. *' It is not so much in any 
one direction that we help the schools," writes one 
of the leaders of the women's clubs, ''but by using 
and creating a watchful spirit of willingness to 
cooperate, when the time comes, on the part of 
the various organizations of the city." This read- 
iness of the active clubs of the city to respond to 
ii6 



THE SPHERE OF VOLUNTEER HELP 

a need and to be called together like a volunteer 
militia, — could anything be dearer to the hearths 
desire of a school superintendent? 

Penny luncheons for school children were in- 
augurated in Cincinnati by some of the women's 
organizations, and in many instances are still 
managed by these organizations. The vacation 
school work is also an outgrowth of women's 
work, and each year certain phases of it are still 
carried on by them. There is a civic commission of 
women who have just taken hold of the dance-hall 
question. The commission will probably take an 
active interest in neighborhood dances and sup- 
port Dr. Condon's plans for social center work in 
the schools. 

In Cincinnati also the Child Labor Committee, 
the Schmidlapp Bureau, and the School Board 
are working together to study and to place the 
boys and girls who leave school at fourteen, when, 
in the wise modern way, a helping hand is offered 
to each child as he crosses the difficult narrow 
bridge between school and work. Each of the 
boys and girls who are tested for working capac- 
ity are registered, and on changing work come 
back for a new certificate and, what is better, for 
friendly counsel. Cincinnati is one of the fortu- 
nate cities that has a special fund of $250,000 for 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

helping women and girls in education and work. 
The fund was given by Mr. J. G. Schmidlapp as 
a living memorial of his daughter. There will 
be more such funds available for schools as the 
schools cultivate the desire of the public to help 
them. 

The Philadelphia Public Education Associa- 
tion, like that of New York, has made it a part of 
its working creed to study the government and 
management of the public schools, and through 
such study achieve power to scale the legisla- 
tive wall and batter the ramparts of entrenched 
finance when need comes. 

This affiliation between school boards and well- 
organized private associations, which like those 
of New York and of Philadelphia make it a part 
of their aim to unite all citizens in the service of 
the schools, is of great importance. The account 
of these two associations must suffice to picture 
the hopes or the fulfillment of many others. All 
associations of this type are pointing with pro- 
phetic fingers to a time when certain of the most 
wise and steadfast groups of private citizens shall 
have a quasi -official relation to public school 
boards. The day is coming, yea and now is, when 
we shall harvest and gamer the help of expert cit- 
Ii8 



THE SPHERE OF VOLUNTEER HELP 

izens and of loyal societies for educational prog- 
ress. This help will in part take the form of vis- 
iting and advisory committees of citizens. In 
New York City there are already, by law, local 
school boards for each district which have the 
power of visiting, inspecting, and reporting the 
needs of public schools. In Massachusetts, as the 
outcome of a state law, every state-aided voca- 
tional school must have an advisory committee 
approved by its board of trustees and confirmed 
by the Massachusetts Board of Education. Here, 
for example, is the advisory committee to the 
Trade School for Girls. Women of distinction are 
glad to serve on it. There an Agricultural School 
for boys calls the best farmers and professors to 
its aid. In Boston the public High School of Com- 
merce has been steadily and effectively helped 
by an advisory board of business men. One of 
these, an eminent lawyer keenly interested in ed- 
ucation, has given many hours of service to this 
school. ^'I believe we have really accomplished 
something there," he says modestly. Those who 
know him know that his help is a hundredfold 
more than he says. This committee of business 
men, having studied the activities of the High 
School of Commerce, are able to make definite 
recommendations to improve the work of the 
119 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

school. An advisory committee of a very different 
type is that on School Hygiene appointed by 
the Boston School Board. A group of doctors, 
called together by the director of physical train- 
ing, discuss athletics, school - feeding, including 
the ethics of accepting patent foods free, open- 
air rooms, their temperature, and the necessary 
clothing for the children. 

The significant point in all this dramatic his- 
tory is not that here and there important results 
have been accomplished by private funds for the 
public schools. The shining fact is that a gold 
mine of the will to help is in our midst. There is 
alloy in the gold ; it will not always be easy to sift 
it out; but of pure gold in the soul of volunteer 
helpers of the schools, I can testify. 



THE GUIDANCE OF VOLUNTEER HELPERS 

If, then, significant and valuable help is already 
given by volunteers to the public schools, if al- 
ready overtures that began shyly and aloof have 
become a friendly alliance, what ought to be the 
attitude of teachers and of volunteer helpers to- 
ward the future of this movement ? 

In the first place, readiness on the part of the 
school to listen sympathetically to what the pub- 
lic wants, and then to guide, restrain, reject, or 
encourage the plan proposed. And this must 
go along with equal readiness on the part of the 
would-be helper to understand school conditions ; 
to be humble, though enthusiastic; to take sim- 
ple jobs, and when necessary, to be turned down 
without offense. It means, in short, that school 
man and volunteer shall learn to get on. 

It is not always easy to get on with enthusiastic 
volunteers. The zealous, lynx-eyed, one-ideaed 
benevolent individual is frankly a nuisance to the 
school superintendent or teacher. Such people 
cling like a burr; we cannot away with them. It 
is a temptation to pull them off one's sleeves at 
121 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

once. "He haunts me!" I once heard a genial 
principal say, referring to a glossy-tongued, lei- 
surely reformer of schools. "He must have a spe- 
cial grudge against me." Oh, no, not at all! He 
was simply blind to the claims of all other school 
work, save that of his beloved panacea. He was 
infallibly sure that his reform was the one thing 
needful. It was strange to him that the teacher 
did not at once leave all and follow his lead. Like 
all fanatics, he lacked even a rudimentary tail of 
humor. Yet even the persistent boring reformer 
may be a blessing in disguise — very decidedly 
in disguise. It develops strength of character and 
skill to learn to rid one's self quite graciously of 
bores, and even more so to distinguish between 
the bore who has nothing to say and the bore who 
has something important to say, but says it very 
badly. And, fortunately, most school helpers 
have something to say and with assistance learn 
to say it well, or become convinced that what the 
head of the school has to say is what they really 
meant. In any event, the teacher must learn to 
get on with all sorts and conditions of visitors, 
for of such is our democracy. I do not, of course, 
mean that the superintendent should accept all 
that is offered to him. There is and ought to be 
a resistant quality in the head of a school. 

122 



GUIDANCE OF VOLUNTEER HELPERS 

*'Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice; 
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment." 

The school superintendent is sure to meet worthy 
individuals who propose worthless or inappropri- 
ate experiments. Yet even with some of these en- 
thusiasts, Mr. John Jay Chapman's brilliant rule 
for successful argument may well be effective: 
'* First get your opponent's point. Then move 
the point; he follows." The untrained critic, who 
wants entirely to make over the schools, often 
turns out to be a loose-growing but luxuriant 
vine, ready to respond to training up the school- 
house wall. 

School Needs and School Reports 
Second, the school head can help the general 
public to respond to his special needs by making 
them clear and picturesque through the news- 
papers and in his annual report. Reports are pa- 
thetic beings, often misunderstood. Because they 
are dry, they serve but to light the hearth-fire in- 
stead of the soul of the house-father. 

An author once wrote to me, ^'Please read my 
essay carefully. It's something that I care about 
very much, — not just another book." But de- 
spite his appeal, I could not get through the shell 
123 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

of his book. The kernel was too heavily covered. 
It is possible, however, to write really succulent 
reports, and good models are at hand.^ The most 
searching questions one can answer in writing a 
school report are two : What is it that makes this 
work, and especially this last year's work, vitally 
interesting to me? What is it that I, as a parent, 
would most want to know about the needs, the 
hopes, the achievement of the public schools? 
Following these two questions comes the third 
that links them to the written word. In what 
form (through photographs, detailed instances, 
charts, symbols) can I reach my enthusiasm for 
the schools across the gap to the mind of a busy 
parent or school helper? 

One paragraph is sure to be noticed ' by the 
reader. It tells what his or her association has 
done for the schools and includes a word of ap- 
preciation thereof. Such paragraphs will light to 
his eyes even a very long- worded report. In any 
report intended to develop the right kind of vol- 
unteer and expert help, courteous acknowledg- 
ment of past favors and suggestions for possible 

1 See School Efficiency and School Reports, by David Snedden 
and William H. Allen, and the stimulating chapter on *' Pub- 
licity and School Needs," in Helping School Children, by Elsa 
Denison. 

124 



GUIDANCE OF VOLUNTEER HELPERS 

favors to come must be prominent.^ Then see 
that your report gets safely to the reader. In 
Boston the admirable report of 191 2 was ad- 
dressed directly to parents, and was in many cases 
carried to them with a letter written by one 
of their older school children. Reports should, of 
course, be sent to all organizations that have 
helped the schools in any way. All of us have 
a secret hunger to know that we are wanted, to 
have our work recognized, to be told specifically 
what is needed. 

Reports should also suggest ways of helpful- 
ness. "What can I do to help?" asks the volun- 
teer. The needs of a school system are endlessly 
varied. The college graduate can make a spe- 
cial study of retarded children, the merchant can 
back up a bill for continuation schools, the ath- 
lete can train the high school baseball team, the 
mother can offer chaperonage at reunions, the 
trained singer can teach choral classes, the farmer 
can lend a bit of land for a school garden, the doc- 
tor can give advice about the best form of medical 
inspection, the woman's club can supply the sal- 
ary of a school nurse. 

1 See the excellent list of suggestions in Outside Cooperation 
•with the Public Schools of Greater New York, p. 26, Bureau of 
Municipal Research, New York. 

125 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

Best Types of Volunteer Help 

Clearly, the volunteer coming with desire to 
help the school must learn to make crisp and 
plain to the school authorities what he wants to 
do. Time is more precious than money and the 
patient principal cannot wisely put up with bur- 
glars of hours and pickpockets of minutes. Not 
to steal time by apologizing, not to steal time by 
vagueness, and not to steal time by repetition, to 
know what one wants to say and how to say it in 
orderly fashion, — this is the first duty of a vol- 
unteer and one of his first lessons in how to help. 
There are many instances of weak and strong 
efforts to help the schools. We all know the 
provoking type of volunteer, nagging, insistent, 
armed with a plea that verges in a threat, "We 
will do this for a few years, but you must take 
the experiment over." We know the intermit- 
tent, unreliable activity that starts a fire only to 
let it die out. We know the prejudiced volunteer 
who pushes a special interest and expects that the 
teacher will make all school work center round 
it. 

The best types of volunteer help to schools are 
usually those welcomed, guided, pruned, if need 
be, by sympathetic school authorities. This 
126 



GUIDANCE OF VOLUNTEER HELPERS 

would seem a groaning burden added to the tired 
shoulders of the schoolmaster were it not for the 
fact that before very long the volunteer begins to 
carry part of the school load. Here, to give an 
example, is an amateur keenly interested in boys 
and girls at the difficult period of fourteen to 
eighteen years. Her children are grown up and 
do not need daily care, but her love for children 
blossoms perennially. She offers through her as- 
sociation both salaried and volunteer workers 
to carry on a small experimental social center, 
if the school board will give light, heat, and the 
use of the hall. The principal of the school at 
first finds it an added responsibility to watch her 
work. She makes mistakes. One night the center 
is too noisy; here and there an unsuccessful vol- 
unteer fails to hold the class. But the principal 
himself has made mistakes. He has learned to 
judge by whole results, not by fragments. He 
talks the matter over with his friendly helper who 
is eager to follow his wishes. He finds that she has 
been traveling at her own expense to study in 
other cities the best plan for recreation centers. 
She has got a firmer hold on the right way of run- 
ning such clubs than she had at the start. She 
suggests and carries through plans of self-govern- 
ment among the young men and girls. She puts 
127 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

responsibility where it belongs by giving them 
offices and making them concern themselves with 
the care of the building and the orderliness of the 
meetings. As the clubs, with their varied pro- 
grams of music, drama, basket-ball, and civic de- 
bate, succeed, she suggests having one room where 
a vocational adviser can meet any of the boys and 
girls who want to talk over their work with her. 
The adviser studies the character and ability of 
the applicant, finds out his difficulties and de- 
sires, urges him to keep a place or suggests one 
that he can try. This union of recreation with a 
chance to talk about to-morrow's work proves 
most successful. It is established as a regular 
part of the social center. 

An account of the work of this particular center 
is written up by a local paper. It excites great in- 
terest. The plan is studied and copied in other 
places. The volunteer who started it is asked to 
speak North and South. The school principal finds 
his centers are thought of as a model. And mean- 
while the amateur, who long has ridden her pet 
hobby of school centers, has become an expert 
rider. She is professional in her standards of 
work, her insight into conditions, her judgment 
of the right kind of teachers, her ability to present 
her cause. With her resources of time, money, 
128. 



GUIDANCE OF VOLUNTEER HELPERS 

and experience she becomes within her field a 
right-hand man to the superintendent. 

The Training of School Helpers 

As the pubHc schools recognize and accept the 
help of outside associations, there will come a 
need and demand for the training of outside help- 
ers to the schools along these newer lines of social 
service. In New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. 
Louis, and Boston, there are established schools 
for the training of social workers. Already we 
train volunteers as workers in hospital social serv- 
ice, as playground leaders, as friendly visitors to 
the needy. But work to further the public schools 
in their aims of health, vocational training, recrea- 
tion, and citizenship is surely in the largest sense 
social work. We need qualified volunteer helpers, 
but perhaps most of all the training of young men 
and women to appreciate and understand the 
aims of public education, so that as citizens, par- 
ents, and school helpers, they will do their part 
wisely in electing school boards, in working for the 
budget, in supporting the best ends of education. 

We must strengthen and uphold the educa- 
tional departments of our colleges and draw them 
closely into touch with the public schools. Enter- 
prising college professors are already giving credit 
129 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

in their classes for work done to help the schools. 
At Harvard, Radcliffe, Wellesley, and Boston 
University the professors of the departments of 
education and economics welcomed and sup- 
ported an investigation by m.embers of their 
classes into the opportunities for vocational train- 
ing in and near Boston. A number of the stu- 
dents became so interested in schools through this 
study that they have since given their services as 
volunteers. One of the graduate students after- 
ward devoted himself, at the request of the school 
authorities, to making a list of all private asso- 
ciations helping the Boston schools. 

The colleges are equipped to give students such 
well-guided study and research. But training for 
special branches of work, such as home and school 
visiting, vocational guidance, leadership in play- 
grounds and recreation centers, will best be given 
through the lectures and field work of some school 
for social workers. Much of this training will lead 
to paid professional work, but in every large 
group there will also be amateurs who want to 
learn to be of value to the public schools. In New 
York, Boston, Philadelphia, groups of several hun- 
dred girls of leisure have united in a league whose 
object is civic and social helpfulness. Out of their 
abundance they want to give each her share of 
130 



GUIDANCE OF VOLUNTEER HELPERS 

helpfulness. With definite training a number of 
these volunteers would prove of real value to our 
schools. Young women often come back from 
college to a Hfe of comparative leisure at home. 
For several years they may have time and trained 
ability to give freely to the service of the public 
schools. I have in mind one young woman who 
graduated from college, — summa cum laude, — 
with highest honors in English. She had time and 
means. Fortunately she had not only means but 
ends. Since leaving college she has given a large 
slice of her life to helping a public trade school for 
girls. The work seemed to her so life-giving that 
within a few years she organized a kind of em- 
ployment bureau for volunteer college graduates, 
like herself, wherein they could learn of varied 
opportunities for service and offer themselves for 
full or part-time work. The next step is to train 
such service. 

Our American nation was once in the period of 
youthful self-assurance regarding any task; when, 
like the man asked whether he could play the 
violin, it was wont to answer, " I don't know ; I Ve 
never tried.'' That time has passed. In all pub- 
lic service we need trained helpers. Volunteers 
who would help the public schools must them- 
selves be experts in their own line, be it the teach- 

131 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

ing of swimming, advice about work, or the or- 
ganization of a parents' association. When train- 
ing to help in the extra-classroom activities of 
the schools is recognized as a new opportunity, 
the force of public support of the schools will be 
more than trebled. 



Democracy and Help to the Schools 

Like the branches of a great oak, the school is 
penetrating far from its main trunk. But the 
branches spread only in order that each individual 
twig and acorn shall have the light and air it 
needs. We are learning that the school cannot 
live alone. It must unite itself with the whole life 
of the children it serves, — their health, their 
play, their work, their home, their future ties of 
friendship and family. One, among the wisest of 
our educators, has written, — "It is socially ex- 
pedient and necessary that all educational pur- 
poses which other agencies will not voluntarily 
assume shall be realized in and by the public 
school in some form." ^ All educational purposes ! 
Such a valiant statement might well terrify those 
who dread the encroachment of the school into 

* David Snedden, Educational Readjustment, p. ii. Hough- 
ton MiflQin Company. 

132 



GUIDANCE OF VOLUNTEER HELPERS 

the foraier sphere of the home, were it not for a 
counter-current. 

The homes are flooding in to help the schools, 
offering hands and minds and purses. No move- 
ment in a democracy can be wholly good if it 
drives the home into less and less importance, 
less and less responsibility. What is happening 
all about us is that school and home have realized 
their common interests and are shaking hands 
over them. Parents are more and more interested 
in schools in proportion as the schools take up 
health, work and play. The general and particular 
public (merchants, doctors, women's clubs, child- 
welfare workers, judges in juvenile courts), who 
are also fathers and mothers, actually or in spirit, 
are more and more interested in schools as they 
touch physical, civic, and ethical themes. To in- 
crease, to interlink, to make clear and effective 
these common ties is the ideal. School and home 
must work together and the work must be mu- 
tual. This book presents evidence that fathers, 
mothers, sisters, cousins, and aunts are eager to 
help the school. We all know that thousands of 
teachers are working to help children and seeking 
for the cooperation of parents. It is not as yet the 
same parent who is helping the school and whom 
the school is longing to help, but the two sides are 

133 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

running to meet one another as folks at the ends 
of a Virginia reel skip down the aisle to join right 
hands. 

There is still another tie in this interaction of 
home and school. The school is just beginning to 
invite the home to weave a few strong threads on 
the loom of education. In two directions this be- 
ginning is already significant. In some public ag- 
ricultural schools the boys are given school credit 
for, and spend the greater part of their school 
time in, work on their own fathers' farms. One 
large agricultural school in western Massachu- 
setts was offered the gift of a fine herd of cows. 
The director refused them. He wanted the boys 
to bring the cows and horses on their family farms 
up to a high standard. He needed the help of the 
home because the home was free from artificial 
conditions. The homes are beginning to open 
hospitable doors to the domestic science classes. 
The department of household arts of the Massa- 
chusetts vocational schools has been helped, as a 
part of its regular course, by cooking-lessons and 
entertainments carried on by the class in the home 
of one of their members. 

Thus we see three currents borne onward by the 
tide of the social movement of our schools. Many 
a volunteer helper is coming with suggestions, 

134 



GUIDANCE OF VOLUNTEER HELPERS 

with funds, with workers to endow the new school 
movement toward health, recreation, employ- 
ment, citizenship, and preparation for family life. 
The school officials are coming to see that they 
need in these newer issues the help of trained 
amateurs. On the crest of these two waves, 
whitens the foam of a third. The homes are be- 
ginning to welcome the teaching of such special 
subjects as dairy-work, cooking, poultry-raising, 
vegetable gardening, in their own surroundings. 
All three movements are part of what it is easy 
to call and difficult to define as the socializing of 
the schools. At bottom the socializing of schools 
must mean the effort to see the life of the children 
as a whole, rather than to treat them as reservoirs 
to hold a given amount of arithmetic, grammar, 
and history. 

When a teacher is freed for a few moments from 
the effort to reach the end of a lesson or tie se- 
curely on the childish back a number of impor- 
tant facts, then she may suddenly see the small 
person himself, — energetic or fragile in health, 
bubbling over with play, ignorant of standards 
in manners and morals, soon to be thrust quite 
unprepared and hopeful out into the world of 
hard-handed work, of unexpected temptation, of 
exposure to disease, of civic and family responsi- 
135 



VOLUNTEER HELP TO SCHOOLS 

bility. Seeing this, the teacher cannot but long 
to give her children the best help in sight, and 
she turns wherever help is to be found. The play- 
ground leader, the story-teller, the picture-lover, 
the musician, the enthusiast for good citizenship, 
the student of the needs of girls will all be her 
allies. As the ideals of education grow year by 
year, the public school-teacher has come to be an 
Atlas trying to uphold the entire world of chil- 
dren's need. Her shoulders are naturally weary. 
Who will share a little of the weight of her load? 
And the answer comes from many a group of citi- 
zens, "Let us carry a part.'' 

This movement is democratic; it comes from 
the people. It adds to the technical side of educa- 
tion a new chord, health, training for trade, rec- 
reation, preparation for manhood. School men 
are surely thinking of these things, but they are 
troubled about many things besides. The up- 
lifted hands of the people are ready to sustain the 
great structure of social life in the schools. The 
schoolmaster has a new task, — he must train not 
only the pupils, but the volunteer helpers; guide 
not only the teachers, but the zealous public. 
And verily he will have his reward, for the people 
of America are forever the feeding spring of sup- 
port to the public schools. If their fountain of 
136 



GUIDANCE OF VOLUNTEER HELPERS 

faith grows dry, the schoolmaster might as well 
shut up shop. But the well-spring of the people's 
hope will leap up into bounteous showers just as 
long as it has a chance to express itself through 
service. 



OUTLINE 

I. SOURCES OF OUTSIDE HELP TO THE 
PUBLIC SCHOOLS 

The perpetual appeal of the public schools ... I 

Early forms of volunteer help 2 

The domain of the school enlarged by help from citi- 
zens 3 

From whom does help come? 6 

Organized efforts 8 

Classification of types of service 11 

11. VOLUNTEER SERVICE IN RELATION TO 
HEALTH 

Medical inspection iS 

Care of delicate children - - - ^^ 

School visitors and housing conditions 17 

The feebleminded iQ 

The value of trained social workers 20 

III. RECREATION UNDER GUIDANCE 

School gardening 23 

Social centers . 28 

Athletics 32 

Vacation schools 33 

Playgrounds 40 

IV. THE ENJOYMENT OF ART 

Opportunities offered by museums of fine arts . . 43 

Opportunities offered by museimis of science ... 49 

Music SO 

139 



OUTLINE 

V. TRAINING FOR WORK 

Vocational guidance 52 

Study of vocational schools 54 

Study of relation of child labor to education ... 56 

Employment supervision 58 

Placement and oversight 61 

Classes in salesmanship 70 

VI. TRAINING FOR CITIZENSHIP 

Moral training 75 

City history clubs and school cities 77 

Traveling exhibit of city conditions 78 

Appointment by merit 80 

Good will expressed in service ........ 83 

VII. TRAINING FOR FAMILY TIES 

Sex education 86 

Supervised dances 92 

East Boston opportunity clubs 93 

The help of librarians 96 

Indirect training for social responsibility .... 98 
The development of moral thoughtfulness . . . .102 

VIII. NEW DEMANDS ON THE SCHOOLS 

Adoption of what once was private work .... 105 

New and taxing functions 106 

Schools as centers of great expectations .... 106 

A survey of new fields 107 

IX. THE SPHERE OF VOLUNTEER HELP 

The encouragement of volunteer help iii 

Value of volunteers in initiating experiments . . .113 

140 



OUTLINE 

In giving expert counsel and aid 114 

As a sustaining force in the community . . . .115 
As a quasi-official advisory board 118 

X. THE GUIDANCE OF VOLUNTEER HELPERS 

Treatment of bores 121 

Appeal for volunteers through school reports . . .123 

Best tj^es of volunteer help 126 

The training of school helpers 129 

Through colleges 130 

Through schools for social workers 130 

New relations of homes to schools 133 

New relations of schools to homes 134 

The lifting power of public interest in schools . .135 



RIVERSIDE EDUCATIONAL 
MONOGRAPHS 

GENERAL EDUCATIONAL THEORY 

xfflWKT's MOEAL PRINCIPLES IN EDUCATION 3B 

Eliot's EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 3* 

Eliot's TENDENCY TO THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL IN MOD- 
ERN EDUCATION *• 



Emerson's EDUCATION. 



.SB 



FisKE's THE MEANING OP INFANCY 36 

IIVDESTHE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY »» 

Palmer's THE IDEAL TEACHER ^^ 

I'uoh'SER's THE TEACHER AND OLD AGE •O 

Tkkman's the TEACHER'S HEALTH W 

Thokndike's INDIVIDUALITY 30 

ADMINISTRATION AND SUPERVISION OF SCHOOLS 

Betts's NEW IDEALS IN RURAL SCHOOLS 60 

Bloomfield's VOCATIONAL GUIDANCE OF YOUTH 60 

Caboi's VOLUNTEER HELP TO THE SCHOOLS 6» 

CuBBERLEY's CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF EDUCATION 88 

CuBBEBLEY's THE IMPROVEMENT OF RURAL SCHOOLS 36 

Perry's STATUS OF THE TEACHER 3B 

Skedden'sTHE PROBLEM OF VOCATIONAL EDUCATION 3B 

Trowbridge's THE HOME SCHOOL 60 

Wekks's the PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 60 

METHODS OF TEACHING 

Bailet's art EDUCATION 60 

Betts's THE RECITATION 60 

Campagnac's the TEACHING OF COMPOSITION 35 

CoOLET's LANGUAGE TEACHING IN THE GRADES 3B 

Dewey's INTEREST AND EFFORT IN EDUCATION 60 

Earhart's TEACHING CHILDREN TO STUDY 60 

Evans's TEACHING OF HIGH SCHOOL MATHEMATICS 30 

Haliburton and Smith's TEACHING POETRY IN THE GRADES 60 

Hartwell's THE TEACHING OF HISTORY 36 

Palmer's ETHICAL AND MORAL INSTRUCTION IN THE SCHOOLS.. .38 

Palmer's SELF-CULTIVATION IN ENGLISH 3B 

SuzzALLo's THE TEACHING OF PRIMARY ARITHMETIC 60 

SuzzALLO's THE TEACHING OF SPELLING 60 

Houghton Mllilin Compaiiy 

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♦THE EVOLUTION OF THE EDUCATIONAL 
IDEAL. 

By Mabel Irene Emerson, First Assistant in Charge, Georg* 
Bancroft School, Boston. $1.00 net. Postpaid. 

In Preparation 
•HEALTH WORK IN THE SCHOOLS. 

By Ernest B. Hoag and Lewis M. Terman. Illustrated. 



HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 



